How to tackle the conceptual inconsistency of audience engagement? The introduction of the Dynamic Model of Audience Engagement

Scholars repeatedly argue that ‘audience engagement’ as a concept and, consequently practice, remain inconsistent and ambiguous. Such conceptual inconsistency is in tension with the relevance phenomenon of audience engagement has gained contemporary discussions about journalism. In this article, we tackle by conducting qualitative examination all academic peer-reviewed publications (217) dealt interrelated terms such ‘user engagement’, ‘news ‘engaged journalism’, published between 2007 2018. Grounded empirical examination, found that, first, definitions operationalisations emphasised production context journalism over reception, yielding relatively unbalanced insights into phenomenon. Second, offer Dynamic Model Audience Engagement composed four dimensions: normative, habitual, spatio-temporal embodied. By grasping complexity multidimensionality aligning notion journalism’s democratic goal informing citizenry more concretely its audience, our facilitates future around topic engagement.