Audience metrics and other quantitative measures are limited in their ability to record and represent the scope and richness of news engagement ideals and practices in journalism. By looking into psychological and behavioral aspects of news engagement, this dissertation work aims to capture the complexity of news engagement. Particularly, this study proposes a news engagement process model that summarizes the mechanisms by which audiences and journalists engage with one other, with the intention of providing a framework that guides scholars to test relationships between journalists’ engagement practices and subsequent audience engagement. The news engagement model consisting of three core constructs—journalists’ behavioral engagement, audiences’ psychological engagement, and audiences’ behavioral engagement—is rooted in the assumption the news engagement process is a reciprocal interaction between journalists and audiences. Based on the proposed model, this study tested one proposition from the model: the effects of journalists’ empathetic communication behaviors (i.e., journalists’ behavioral engagement) on audiences’ psychological engagement. Emotionality, as opposed to historically detached practices in journalism, is considered to be an approach to enrich audience and journalist relationships. An online experiment with 338 respondents (2 X 3 factorial, between subjects) was conducted to test the impact of journalists’ empathetic communication in radio news stories, each describing a catastrophic event, on audiences’ psychological engagement. Audiences’ psychological engagement was measured using the following variables: sadness, journalist identification, interviewee identification, cognitive involvement (attention, recognition, and elaboration), and transportation. Relevance and novelty were predicted to moderate the main effects between the reporter’s empathetic reporting and audiences’ psychological engagement. Results of the experiment indicated that the radio journalist’s empathetic communication did not have a significant impact on audiences’ psychological engagement. In addition, neither relevance nor novelty had a significant interaction effect. In ad-hoc analyses that were based only on the responses of regular radio news listeners, the journalist’s empathetic reporting was instead negatively related to respondents’ feeling sad and recognition (against the predictions). These non-significant and contradictory results may suggest—despite the scholarly push for empathetic communication among journalists —that audiences may not respond or respond negatively to expressions of empathy by professional journalists in broadcast news stories. Implications and directions for further research are presented, emphasizing the need for detailed investigation of the contexts in which journalists should adopt perspective-taking in journalism practice.
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