Newsrooms spend enormous amounts of time measuring engagement.
Clicks. Comments. Shares. Likes. Subscriptions. Time spent.
But new research from Pew Research Center suggests those highly visible behaviors may tell only part of the story.
On the latest episode of Local Media Association’s Keep It Local podcast, host Ryan Welton spoke with Luxuan Wang, a research associate on Pew’s news and information research team, about a new report examining how Americans engage with news, politics, religion and civic life.
The research, part of the Pew-Knight Initiative, examined roughly 90 measures of public participation and grouped Americans into four broad categories: mobilizers, connectors, spectators and outsiders.
The findings offer an important reminder for local newsrooms: Some of the people paying close attention to your journalism may be the people you hear from the least.
Four ways Americans engage
Rather than placing Americans on a simple scale from engaged to disengaged, Pew researchers used cluster analysis to identify different combinations of behaviors.
Mobilizers, roughly one in 10 Americans, are highly active across politics, civic life, news and religion.
Connectors are heavily involved in their communities and religious or civic organizations but are less likely to participate directly in political activity.
Spectators closely follow the news and frequently engage with information online, but are much less likely to participate publicly in civic or political activities.
Outsiders participate less frequently across most of the activities Pew measured, including following news, voting and volunteering.
The last three groups each represent roughly three in 10 Americans.
“The biggest takeaway for us is that there isn’t one way to be engaged,” Wang said.
For newsrooms, that distinction matters.
Your commenters aren’t your entire audience
Digital journalists have long used visible behaviors such as comments, shares and reactions as indicators of audience engagement.
But Pew’s research suggests that could lead news organizations to overemphasize their loudest and most expressive users.
Spectators are a particularly important example.
According to Wang, 84% of people in the spectator group say they follow national news at least somewhat closely — a rate comparable to mobilizers and connectors.
They are also active online, including liking, saving and privately sharing news.
What they are less likely to do is publicly announce their participation.
“If we only look at those groups” who comment or post publicly, Wang said, “we may be looking at the most visible, expressive and loud audience, but not necessarily the entire audience.”
That has implications for how newsrooms evaluate story performance and audience loyalty.
A reader who never comments may still read frequently. A viewer who never shares a video publicly may send it privately to friends. Someone who rarely interacts with a newsroom’s social account may nevertheless rely heavily on its journalism.
Younger audiences aren’t necessarily checked out
The report also complicates a familiar concern inside newsrooms: that younger Americans simply do not care about news.
Pew found that younger adults are less likely than older adults to closely follow news. But adults under 30 are also considerably more likely to belong to the spectator group.
Nearly half of adults younger than 30 fall into that category, compared with about one in five adults 65 and older.
That suggests younger audiences may remain connected to public life primarily through news and online information, even if they are less likely to consume traditional news products.
Wang said other Pew research has shown younger adults are more likely to encounter news without actively seeking it out.
Social media, creators, podcasts, newsletters and news influencers are all increasingly important parts of that experience.
“They may not sit down for a newscast or browse a news website or read a newspaper,” Wang said, “but that doesn’t mean that news is not reaching them.”
For publishers trying to reach the next generation of news consumers, the finding reinforces the importance of distributing journalism in the places where audiences already spend their time rather than expecting them to adopt traditional consumption habits.
Local news still holds a trust advantage
The conversation also touched on another persistent newsroom challenge: trust.
Wang said Pew’s research consistently finds that Americans generally trust local news organizations more than national news organizations, across age groups and political affiliations.
At the same time, trust in both national and local journalism has declined.
Pew’s engagement research also found that people can simultaneously rely on journalism and remain skeptical about whether news organizations cover political and social issues fairly.
“Trust is not all or nothing,” Wang said.
Someone may value journalism, regularly consume local news and still question portions of its coverage.
That complexity matters for newsrooms attempting to rebuild trust. Heavy news consumption should not automatically be interpreted as unquestioning trust, just as a lack of public interaction should not automatically be interpreted as disengagement.
A different way to think about engagement
For newsroom leaders, perhaps the biggest lesson from Pew’s research is to broaden the definition of what an engaged audience looks like.
Mobilizers are easy to see.
Commenters are easy to count.
People who attend community meetings, join organizations or publicly advocate for causes are visible.
But large portions of the public participate much more quietly.
They read. They watch. They listen. They save. They privately share.
And sometimes, the news simply finds them.
For local publishers trying to understand their communities, those quieter audiences may be just as important as the people raising their hands.
Keep It Local is a podcast from Local Media Association featuring conversations with the people building the future of sustainable local journalism.
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Editor’s note: Artificial Intelligence was used to transcribe the podcast and create a summary.