Examining Platforms’ Affordances: Bridging Journalists’ and Users’ Practices of Online Engagement

Digital technologies, especially social media platforms, are crucial to journalism’s engagement with audiences. Journalists depend on these information technologies to distribute news, while users largely rely on social media platforms for informing themselves. However, research on the role of platforms in journalism appears to have mainly focused on the risks they pose to the profession with little attention given to how platforms’ affordances facilitate engagement. The aim of this study is to examine how the expectations of journalists and users about the role of digital platforms coincide or differ in terms of the affordances for engagement with each other. We conducted in-depth interviews with 31 news users and 10 professional journalists in Chile, focusing on their use of social media related to news. Our study reveals some alignments and misalignments on the platforms’ digital affordances in three dimensions: contextual flexibility, informational access and use, and interactive communication. Journalists primarily focus on mobile use on the go, while users often access news at home. Both groups align on the exposure function of platforms but differ in their perceptions of content personalization and availability. Additionally, while journalists encourage interaction, users are often reluctant to engage deeply or are unaware of these expectations.