Abstract
A large and growing body of literature shows that audience metrics exert a significant influence in many newsrooms around the world. Scholars assume that this might affect the quality of news, but findings on how audience metrics influence news quality and media performance are scattered. Based on a widely used set of news quality criteria, this article is the first to focus on this question. It reviews and discusses the existing findings by considering the influence of audience metrics across four analytical dimensions: A) the allocation of resources and recognition; B) the volume, practices and rhythms of news production; C) the selection and placement of topics; and D) the formats and styles of news presentation. The analysis reveals that journalists’ use of audience metrics has a mainly negative impact on news quality. This effect is the result of both the growing economic pressures on newsrooms and a dominant rhetoric that equates measures of audience size with audience interests and good journalistic work.
Highlights
Since the pioneering studies of MacGregor (2007) and Anderson (2011), reflection on the role of audience metrics in newsrooms “has become an important new area in journalism research” (Bruns, 2016, p. 521), with more than 100 studies shedding light on this issue
Ethnographic studies that combine participant observation and interview methods reveal that journalists refer to the importance of a balance between maximising audience metrics and maintaining editorial values, while “most of the time, the balancing act does not lead to the ideal, and often, it tips towards the goal of increasing traffic by using web analytics to come up with click-bait stories” (Tandoc, 2014, p. 570)
While early studies concluded that audience metrics are rarely used for the immediate modification of articles (MacGregor, 2007), more recent studies indicate that news reports are often modified if they do not generate the expected number of page views, in particular by changing headlines or exchanging pictures and videos (Bodó, 2019; Karlsson & Clerwall, 2013; Moyo et al, 2019; Slaček Brlek, 2018; Tandoc, 2014; Whittaker, 2018; Wyss, 2013)
Summary
Since the pioneering studies of MacGregor (2007) and Anderson (2011), reflection on the role of audience metrics in newsrooms “has become an important new area in journalism research” (Bruns, 2016, p. 521), with more than 100 studies shedding light on this issue. Studies were considered relevant if they provided empirical findings or original considerations on the influence of audience metrics on news quality, and if they were published as journal articles, books, book chapters or research reports. Based on the abovementioned criteria of news quality, this article reviews and discusses existing findings on the interplay of media performance and audience metrics. In doing so, it analytically distinguishes the influence of audience metrics across four dimensions: the allocation of resources and recognition (Section 2); the volume, practices and rhythms of news production (Section 3); the selection and placement of topics (Section 4); and the formats and styles of news presentation (Section 5). The article concludes with reflections on how datafication establishes new norms of evaluation that are linked to a rhetoric of audience empowerment while neglecting audience interests and quality issues (Section 6)
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