Hardly Used, But Highly Appreciated? Use, Importance and Effects of Engagement-Oriented Journalism

Declining revenue and public discussions about declining trust reinforce the need for journalism to work on building stronger relationships with its audience(s). Audience engagement is regularly discussed as one way to do so. The active involvement of audiences in journalistic processes and a focus on their wants, needs and interests should contribute to building trust and, in turn, sustainable revenue for journalism. Digital environments create new possibilities for an active inclusion of the audience. However, we thus far have only little knowledge about how participatory offers (especially those that can be classified as high-engagement) are used, how important they are to recipients and whether the perception of journalism as audience-oriented actually contributes to building trust in journalism. Based on a quantitative survey representative of the German population, we show that while recipients are rather reserved when it comes to using participatory features in journalism, they nevertheless do consider them relatively important. Furthermore, we show that the perception of journalism as engaging and audience-oriented significantly correlates with recipients’ trust in journalism. Our study thus demonstrates that audience engagement presents a promising way to build trust in journalism, leaving us with implications for both journalism studies and practice.