We need to think about their real needs: Examining the auxiliary work of audience-oriented intralopers in news organizations

Amid an increasing focus on becoming audience-centric in news organizations, there is growing interest in studying non-journalistic actors, i.e. intralopers; internally hired non- journalistic actors such as technologists and business-people (Holton & Belair-Gagnon 2018) and how they shape news organizations and journalism. Through new job titles and roles, intralopers enter news organizations to help understand, reach and engage audiences. Subsequently, they bring in new practices, values and epistemologies which can challenge, change and conflict with the traditional roles and culture of journalism. Explicating the role and influence of audience-oriented intralopers, the study draws on qualitative interviews with 14 non-journalistic and six journalistic actors across three different news organizations: a public service media, a legacy media and a digital born startup media.
The study explicates four defining aspects of audience-oriented intralopers’ work and impact upon journalism: 1) translating what the audience really want, 2) organizationally gatekeeping the audience in innovation processes, 3) engineering audience interaction and 4) shaping the organizational data culture. The study fills a gap by shedding light on a professional group and an emerging modus operandi that is well-researched in creative and production-oriented media research, but, as they operate mainly outside the newsroom, remain largely overlooked in journalism studies.