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The news industry faces profound financial instability and public distrust. Many believe the solution to these ongoing crises is for journalists to improve their relationship with their audiences. This raises important questions: How do journalists conceptualize their audiences in the first place? What is the connection between what journalists think about their audiences and what they do to reach them? Perhaps most important, how aligned are these 'imagined"'audiences with the real ones? 'Imagined Audiences' draws on ethnographic case studies of three news organizations to show how journalists' assumptions about their audiences shape their approaches to their audiences. In doing so, it examines the role that audiences traditionally have played in journalism, how that role has changed, and what those changes mean for both the profession and the public.

As news publishers continue to lose subscribers and advertising revenue, journalism practitioners and researchers have looked to newcomers to the field for ideas of how to adapt and succeed in a much more saturated and unstable media environment. Many have specifically looked to digital native news organizations to understand the ways that journalism is attempting to reinvent itself for a media landscape that is very different from the previous one. Yet what often gets lost in this focus on the newest news organizations is the resilience of many of journalism's older ones. In this study, I analyze a year's worth of U.S.-based online news consumption data to show that, even in a media environment increasingly saturated with digital native news outlets, legacy news brands continue to comprise a majority of the most popular news sites. Drawing on audience studies literature, I argue that these findings likely reflect audience preferences for familiar, established brands, as well as structural advantages these brands maintain due to their size and capital. I conclude that the fate of digital news organizations is not just a question of their innovativeness or nimbleness. It is also a question of their ability to combat a combination of powerful, stubborn forces: the habits of the people they hope to reach, and the deep pockets of their competitors.

Many journalism stakeholders have begun looking to philanthropic foundations to help newsrooms find economic sustainability. The rapidly expanding role of foundations as a revenue source for news publishers raises an important question: How do foundations exercise their influence over the newsrooms they fund? Using the hierarchy of influence model, this study utilizes more than 40 interviews with journalists at digitally native nonprofit news organizations and employees from foundations that fund nonprofit journalism to better understand the impact of foundation funding on journalistic practice. Drawing on previous scholarship exploring extra-media influence on the news industry, we argue that the impact of foundations on journalism parallels that of advertisers throughout the 20th century - with one important distinction: Journalism practitioners and researchers have long forbidden the influence from advertisers on editorial decisions, seeing the blurring of the two as inherently unethical. Outside funding from foundations, on the other hand, is often premised on editorial influence, complicating efforts by journalists to maintain the firewall between news revenue and production.

In light of the recent US election, many fear that "fake news" has become a force of enormous reach and influence within the news media environment. We draw on well-established theories of audience behavior to argue that the online fake news audience, like most niche content, would be a small subset of the total news audience, especially those with high availability. By examining online visitation data across mobile and desktop platforms in the months leading up to and following the 2016 presidential election, we indeed find the fake news audience comprises a small, disloyal group of heavy Internet users. We also find that social network sites play an outsized role in generating traffic to fake news. With this revised understanding, we revisit the democratic implications of the fake news crisis.

The all-consuming nature of coronavirus news coverage has made the COVID-19 pandemic a unique opportunity to explore the relationship between audience trust in and engagement with news. This study examines that relationship through 60 Zoom-based qualitative interviews conducted with a diverse sample of US adults during the early phase of the pandemic. We find that how people approach the news stems not only from how they perceive the trustworthiness of individual news outlets, but also from their own self-perceptions. News consumers believe journalism generally suffers from issues of bias, but that they are savvy and independent-minded enough to see through those biases to find the truth. Putting the concept of partisan selective exposure into conversation with folk theories of news consumption, we conclude that people's approach to and trust in news is as dependent on what they bring to the news as it is on what news brings to them.

Although the Internet has redefined interactions between the individual and the community, the U.S. civic engagement that so impressed Tocqueville still occurs today. Using data derived from a longitudinal survey of undergraduate students at a Midwestern university, we find that digital civic engagement fills the void left by drops in more conventional forms of political participation. We also find that educators have an important role to play in cultivating and maintaining online and offline civic engagement among younger people. We conclude that scholars and undergraduate educators need to develop curricula that build upon the ways students currently participate in democracy.

Public trust in journalism has fallen disconcertingly low. This study sets out to understand the news industry's credibility crisis by comparing public perceptions of journalism with public perceptions of another institution facing similar trust challenges: healthcare. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 31 US adults, we find that although both healthcare and journalism face public distrust, members of the public generally tend to feel more trusting of individual doctors than they do of individual journalists. This is because people (a) perceive doctors to be experts in their field and (b) engage more frequently with doctors than they do with journalists. Consequently, our interviewees described treating their doctors as "fact-checkers" when it comes to health information they find online, demonstrating trust in their physicians despite their lack of trust in healthcare more broadly. Meanwhile, the opposite unfolds in journalism: Instead of using legitimate news sources to fact-check potential misinformation, people feel compelled to "fact-check" legitimate news by seeking alternative sources of corroboration. We conclude that, to improve their credibility among the public, journalists must strike the right balance between persuading the public to perceive them as experts while also pursuing opportunities to engage with the public as peers.

Trust in news is declining globally and has been for some time a phenomenon that has been amplified in the context of a global pandemic, the rise in anti-media populism, and social and political unrest. Overall, public trust in journalism remains low (44% globally), according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021. Building on a growing body of research on predictors of (dis)trust among news audiences, this study examines survey data from the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021 to explore distrust profiles - comparative profiles of users based on their relative distrust in news in general, news they consume, and news accessed through digital intermediaries like social and search - across distinct news environments: India, South Korea, and the US. We conclude that, across all three countries, there are large segments who either trust everything or distrust everything, suggesting a trust polarization phenomenon. Moreover, the results identify segments of swing trusters, users who trust some news and distrust other types but do not indicate a blanket tendency to trust or distrust everything. Normative expectations about the institution of journalism (i.e., folk theories) seem to be the most powerful factors in explaining the relative likelihood of membership in all profiles, where expectations regarding impartiality, concern about fake news, and fair coverage were important indicators of (dis)trust, with varying degrees depending on the media, political, and technological contexts in which they are situated. These findings suggest that to regain trust, journalists should consider how they can change people's folk theories when it comes to news by comprehensively taking into account the unique trajectory of a given country's media system.