Between creative and quantified audiences: Web metrics and changing patterns of newswork in local US newsrooms

Abstract

How are transformations in newswork intersecting with changes in the monitoring of reader behavior and new technologies of audience measurement? How, in short, are journalistic ‘visions of the audience’ shifting in the online era, and how are they enabling particular editorial practices? This article explores a provocative tension between the now common rhetorical invocation of the news audience as a ‘productive and generative’ entity, and the simultaneous, increasingly common institutional reduction of the audience to a quantifiable, rationalizable, largely consumptive aggregate. The first half of article reviews the literature on the relationship between audience understanding and newsroom practices. The second half of the article is comprised of an ethnographic analysis of the manner by which increasingly prominent and widespread techniques of audience measurement and quantification interact with the newsroom rhetoric of the active, generative audience. The article concludes with some thoughts regarding the role played by audience quantification and rationalization in shifting newswork practices. It argues that the underlying rhetoric of the active audience can be seen as laying the groundwork for a vision of the professional reporter that is less autonomous in his or her news decisions and increasingly reliant on audience metrics as a supplement to news judgment.

Effective Headlines of Newspaper Articles in a Digital Environment

“…The role of these metrics for online journalism is significant, as they have become determining factors in news production. Decisions are less based on instinct and more on actual data (Anderson 2011;MacGregor 2007). Lee and Lewis (2012) have shown a statistically significant influence of these data on the decisions that editors make.…”

Making News, Making the Economy: Technological Changes and Financial Pressures in Brazil

“…While contemporary newsroom studies have explored the impact of digital technologies on newsmaking -e.g. homogenization, standardization, convergence, audience quantification (Anderson, 2011;Boczkowski, 2010;Usher, 2014) -with few exceptions (Mello, 2009), little ethnographic research has been done in contemporary newsrooms in Brazil. To be sure, the current financialization of news -namely, a shift from producing news for the public towards producing news for the market -is a pressure on journalism worldwide.…”

“…Convergence between print and digital media production (Boczkowski, 2004;Hay and Couldry, 2011), standardization in news assembly, the greater role played by news agencies (Boyer, 2011(Boyer, , 2013 and increasing imitation between media outlets (Boczkowski, 2010;Powers and Benson, 2014) are among the worldwide tendencies that have contributed to change newsmaking in the Internet age. Increasing commercial pressures in profit-driven media organizations (Benson and Hallin, 2007;Klinenberg, 2005) and unprecedented levels of citizen input in the making of news via both social media (Usher, 2014) and audience quantification (Anderson, 2011), have also seriously altered journalistic practices.…”

On Automation in Media Industries: Integrating Algorithmic Media Production into Media Industries Scholarship

“…Many newsrooms now operate with comprehensive and immediate feedback related to various aspects of online news consumption, ranging from page views to time spent on a site/story, to ratings, to volume and valence of comments. 12 Consider also the case of "content farms." Content farms mine search-engine data to estimate demand for content on various topics, and then produce that content rapidly and cheaply in order to meet that demand.…”