Digital news audience engagement and web metrics: exploring major research trends

Abstract

In today’s digital era, new audience tracking tools have become available for use by journalists and editors. These digital tools bring both innovations and challenges. The goal of this exploratory literature review is to define the rough contours of the recent trends in research focusing on j-audience engage- ment metrics. While journalists have access to dynamic and diverse analytics data, it is not clear what the best way to interpret these data is and how journalists should benefit from using these tools. In this review, using exploratory content analysis, I will map the key research directions and emerging themes in the digital audience engagement studies published within 2013-2018. By no means has this review represented an exhaustive analysis. Instead, it attempts to define some key themes emerging in the research studies that focus on the digital news engagement through the prism of audience metrics. The findings suggest that when studying audience engagement and web metrics the scholars were particularly interested in four major research topics: a) the impact of metrics on journalism; b) how met- rics are produced, interpreted, and used; c) what metrics fail to measure; d) changing power dynamics between news consumers and news producers. The findings of this study will be useful for journalists, news editors and media scholars in understanding the nuanced interplay between web metrics and newsroom decisions. Key words: audience engagement, news engagement, digital news, web metrics, web analytics.