Abstract: This study explores the tension between management, journalists and their audience around audience engagement with a focus on the role of newsroom unionization. Ethnographic work in three U.S. newsrooms and interviews with 130 journalists, newsroom managers and editors in four newsrooms, shows that audience engagement work encourages unionization and that journalists in already unionized newsrooms regard the relationships with their audience as more collaborative than combative.
Tag: audience engagement
Laughing with Science: The influence of audience approval on engagement
Abstract: While there is mounting evidence that humor can be an effective means of engaging publics, much remains to be learned about the contextual factors that shape how audiences receive and process humorous scientific content. Analyzing data from a controlled experiment (N = 217), this study explores the differential impact of exposure to stand-up comedy featuring a scientist that generates considerable laughter from the audience vs. stand-up comedy lacking audience reaction. Among the key findings, audience laughter served to heighten the affective response of viewers, and affective response was positively linked to two forms of audience engagement with science.