Making Audience Engagement Visible

This chapter focuses on data from one longitudinal study, the Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX), as an illustrative case. It illustrates the uses of the ATNIX dataset—and, by extension, of similar empirical data that may be gathered from other social media platforms—in understanding the activities and dynamics of social media-based news audiences as they actively engage with and contribute to the news. The chapter explores the temporal dynamics of news engagement over time, examines the specific social media footprints of different news organizations, and thus reveals social media audiences&s; overall role in disseminating, discussing, and evaluating the news. It compares these patterns with other data about the general use of online news sources in Australia to highlight the similarities and differences between the active social media news audience and more general online news audiences. Early in journalistic process, the focus of scholars and practitioners alike turned to the rise of citizen journalism as an alternative form of collaborative news production.