Engineering Consent

Abstract

As the reach and influence of audience analytics tools continue to grow in newsrooms, a burgeoning body of scholarship conceptualizes them as a form of managerial surveillance that seeks to standardize journalistic work and render it more reliably profitable. While workers in many contexts have been found to resist the rationalization of their labor process, existing research suggests that journalists have become increasingly amenable to—and even powerfully fixated on—the analytics dashboards that quantitatively monitor their performance and rank them against their peers. Drawing on six months of ethnographic observation and interviews at a leading newsroom analytics startup, this article examines the discursive strategies and design elements employed by analytics companies to engineer journalists’ consent to analytics-driven labor discipline. These include performing deference to editorial judgment, professing allegiance to journalism’s institutional norms, and providing a habit-forming user experience. Such tactics enable the newsroom analytics dashboard to extract increased productivity from journalist-users—and to do so in a way that obfuscates, rather than highlights, managerial influence in the newsroom. The article concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for future research on the rationalization of journalistic work in the digital age.