The relational UX
The relational UX

Constructing repertoires of audience agency in pioneer journalism practice

Summary/Abstract: This article examines how “pioneer journalists” (Hepp & Loosen, 2020) in legacy newsrooms create preferred audience experiences through their UX practices in a networked media ecosystem where journalism’s epistemic authority is increasingly contested. Grounded in the encoding/decoding paradigm (Hall, 1973, 1980), this study combines semi-structured inter- views with 12 journalism pioneers in London-based legacy newsrooms, with the in-depth analysis of the multimodal/interactivity features of two example stories. The findings suggest that audiences are interpellated through the construction of various repertoires of agency, grounded in empathy, for a closer, more immediate, and active involvement in the story. By creating ‘relational UXs’ that try to control the travel of meanings and the pro-duction of emotions, pioneers in legacy news organisations place a stronger emphasis on the relational renegotiation of epistemic authority, a strategy to simultaneously embrace active audiences and sustain journalism’s traditional raison d’etre – making sense of the world for the public.

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