Understanding News Audience Logics on Social Media: Inter-Audience Agenda Setting as a Five-Factor Framework

Mainstream journalism has encountered multiple crises in recent decades, such as declining trust, the collapse of revenue models, and competition for audiences across a fractured digital media ecosystem. Concurrently, social media has emerged as a platform for audience-driven news agendas that are now shaped outside of the mainstream news media ecosystem. This study proposes a five-factor framework of inter-audience agenda setting to better understand the digital audience influence dynamics at play when news audiences share and critique journalism on social media. Using thematic analysis, this research analysed commonalities in 75 studies from the adjacent literature on social media agenda setting, digital marketing, digital publics research, intermedia agenda setting and two-step flow theories. From this, the five factors identified and proposed to underpin the inter-audience agenda-setting process are: replication of object/agenda, affirmation of judgement, validation of perspectives, need to align with the majority, and trust in one’s peers. Greater understanding of inter-audience agenda-setting processes on social media is proposed as another potential mechanism for journalism to stem declining audience trust and increase audience engagement in a fractured digital media sphere.