Imagined audiences as interpretive filters

Metrics and journalistic role performance across two magazine brands within one media organisation

Bibliographic Data

ID19477199
AuthorsPauljan Truyens (0000-0002-1247-4540, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, corresponding author)
Year2026
Publication date2026-05-08
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournalism (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-8849 • E-ISSN: 1741-3001
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/14648849261451900
OpenAlexW7160628201
LanguageEN
References cited28

This study examines how journalists interpret shared audience metrics through brand-specific imagined audiences, and how these interpretations shape narrated journalistic role performance. It draws on a qualitative case study of two weekly magazine brands — a lifestyle title and a business-finance title — within the same Flemish commercial publisher during the staged rollout of more “sophisticated” audience metrics. Combining ethnographic materials from an extended collaboration with the organisation and 17 expert interviews, the study brings Litt’s concept of the imagined audience into dialogue with research on journalistic role performance, focusing on service, infotainment, and civic-oriented roles. The analysis shows that imagined audiences function as interpretive filters between a shared corporate metrics infrastructure and newsroom practice. At the lifestyle magazine, journalists imagine a close community of readers whose lives resemble their own and treat selected engagement indicators as confirmation of audience closeness. At the business-finance magazine, journalists invoke a distant but demanding audience of expert readers and investors and frame metrics more sceptically, often as instruments of managerial oversight. The comparison shows that the same analytics regime does not produce uniform editorial consequences: imagined audiences shape which metrics are considered meaningful, how they are interpreted, and how they are translated into role claims. The study thus refines scholarship on imagined audiences and metricised journalism by specifying how shared infrastructures yield divergent forms of audience-oriented role performance within the same organisation

Analytics · Audience reception · Ethnography · Flemish · Gatekeeping · Journalism · Scholarship · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Media Studies and Communication · Public Relations and Crisis Communication

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