Constanza Gajardo León

While loyalty has become increasingly relevant for journalism, it has rarely been examined as a single phenomenon and even less from an audience perspective. The empirical knowledge surrounding loyalty has centred on its role in trust, news choice, and the sustainability of the profession. Nonetheless, we still do not know how a relationship with journalism unfolds and becomes meaningful for news users. This research aims to advance an in-depth understanding of the dynamics of loyalty with journalism. To this end, we conducted 35 semi-structured in-depth interviews with regular news users (18–65 years old). By exploring the language, feelings, emotions, and stories that people use to describe their relationship with journalism, this article offers a holistic and comprehensive examination of what loyalty means as part of audiences’ everyday news consumption. In doing so, we aim to expand journalism’s vocabulary about loyalty, adding width and depth to our understanding of the potential benefits and implications that loyalty entails for the profession.

Journalists’ increasing focus on news users is often seen as diverting the news agenda away from the core issues that are important to democracy. Hence, the practices of connecting journalists to the audience tend to be assessed as detrimental to the democratic function of journalism: informing citizens and facilitating public opinion. However, this normative link between practice and ideals has rarely been empirically addressed when studying audience engagement. In this article we use a case study (BiobioChile) to provide a more precise understanding of the democratic relevance that everyday engagement with the audience—through and beyond metrics—entails for journalism. First, our analysis suggests that audiences can be integrated into journalism’s democratic framework by moving beyond the dilemma of informed citizenship versus news user’s metrics to include what we propose to call living citizens: empirical concrete living beings grounded in journalistic practice. Second, we distinguish three audience oriented roles—observer, listener and connector—aimed both at maximizing the attention of news users, and at making sense of their needs as living citizens. These roles cover verifiable routines and values, thereby enabling a better assessment of the fulfilment of the democratic ideals of journalism.