Constructing audience quantification: Social influences and the development of norms about audience analytics and metrics

Abstract

Audience analytics and metrics are ubiquitous in today’s media environment. However, little is known about how creative media workers come to understand the social norms related to those technologies. Drawing on social influence theory, this study examines formal and informal socialization mechanisms in U.S. newsrooms. It finds that editorial newsworkers express receiving a moderate amount of training on the use of analytics and metrics, which is typically provided by their organization; primarily look to people within the organization, and especially superiors, to understand the social norms; learn about those norms mostly through observation and communication about others’ experiences with the technology rather than their own; and that experiences are influenced by the organizational context and the individual’s position in the editorial hierarchy. This leads to a broader intervention to our understanding of the social structures and individual dispositions that influence how emerging technologies are experienced across organizational and institutional environments.

Open-Source Trading Zones and Boundary Objects: Examining GitHub as a Space for Collaborating on “News”

“…It may also serve a valuable signaling function wherein organizations can convey their commitments to certain ideals, and through which individuals-and insiders like newsroom developers in particular-can seek to gain reputational capital (Boyles, 2019). However, even if the amount of trade is limited, it may nevertheless prove influential if the individuals doing the trade are viewed as opinion leaders within their respective domains (see Zamith et al, 2019).…”

“…Indeed, such spaces may be considered central to the formation of and enaction by "pioneer communities" (Hepp, 2016, p. 924), or collectives that help drive changes in the logics and practices linked to a particular domain (e.g., media). Trade may be consequential to the formation of norms and processes even if it only occurs among some members of distinct communities, so long as those individuals are viewed as opinion leaders within a domain (Zamith, Belair-Gagnon, & Lewis, 2019).…”

Data loop of media and audience

“…• The profiling of users (Couldry & Turow, 2014;Turow, 2011); • The establishment of predictions (O'Neil, 2016); • The identification of metrics (Anderson, 2011;Zamith et al, 2019); • The visualisation of data (Engebretsen & Kennedy, 2020);…”

(Against a) Theory of Audience Engagement with News

“…In recent years, as we have entered the "media analytics stage" of technological media (Manovich 2018), audience metrics have come to the fore in these discussions, especially within the news industry, which relies on metrics not only to monitor audience behaviour but also, increasingly, as the preferred way to analyze the inner and perhaps unconscious motivations driving audience engagement (e.g American Press Institute 2019). Academics focusing on the institutional state-of-the-art understandably follow in tandem, researching the uses, feelings, and social integration of analytic systems (e.g., Tandoc 2019;Zamith, Belair-Gagnon, and Lewis 2019). However, marshalling data in this way conflates what metrics actually do (a system logic that aggregates measurable digital signals, and correlates this with pre-existent data through models, algorithms, and machine learning) with what they seem to imply (a market logic that hopes to predict people's preferences and predispositions).…”

“…However, marshalling data in this way conflates what metrics actually do (a system logic that aggregates measurable digital signals, and correlates this with pre-existent data through models, algorithms, and machine learning) with what they seem to imply (a market logic that hopes to predict people's preferences and predispositions). Within journalism studies, researchers have been preoccupied with the connections between audience metrics, engagement and news, arguing that engagement is a significant factor for the business models of digital-born and legacy news media (e.g., Batsell 2015;Nelson and Webster 2016), and that newsroom practices are increasingly shaped by the analysis of audience metrics in order to create news suited to engage the audience (e. g. Cherubini and Nielsen 2016;Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc 2018;Zamith, Belair-Gagnon, and Lewis 2019) even though the adoption of audience metrics in newsrooms might have been slower and less universal than first assumed (Nelson and Tandoc 2019). In recent years, new roles such as "engagement editor", "engagement reporter", "head of audience engagement" and similar titles have emerged in newsrooms, predominantly in the US, the UK and Australia.…”