The Bob Franklin Journal Article Award, a collaboration between Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice and Digital Journalism, seeks to recognise the article that best contributes to our understanding of connections between culture and society and journalism practices, journalism studies and/or digital media/new technologies.
“The three journals - Digital Journalism, Journalism Practice and Journalism Studies - have continued to grow their readerships and international rankings and ratings across 2020-2021, but have also delivered a quite outstanding crop of finely crafted scholarly papers drawing on a wide range of research evidence and compelling argument to address a broad range of significant topics. I think that each of the three papers shortlisted is among the very best contenders for this Award to date.
The article by Steensen, Ferrer-Conill and Peters was chosen as the winner of the Bob Franklin Journal Article Award for 2020-2021 because “the typology it develops for understanding audience engagement is a novel contribution, and the critical perspective it adopts (critiquing the narrow understanding of audience engagement prevalent in industry discourse) opens up new approaches for future research.”
The winning article “offers a superb conceptual exploration of audience engagement, which [currently] tends to be inadequately operationalised and insufficiently contested either empirically or normatively, … argues for understanding engagement as encompassing emotional, normative and ‘spatiotemporal’ dimensions as well as the more readily quantifiable (and industry-appealing) but quite limited ‘technical-behavioural’ approach, … and offers a clear and well-supported model that will be useful for scholars seeking to design empirical research to explore any of these dimensions.”