Audience Analytics and Metrics
The digitization of news has significantly changed how audience interests and consumption are measured. Specifically, digital systems enable passive, mass tracking. This means that when a person accesses a story, the infrastructure helping to serve that content — that is, the computer systems belonging to the journalistic organization and, often, other companies as well — will automatically record the fact that the content was accessed. These systems also often record additional information, including when that person accessed the content, where (roughly) they accessed it from, on what device, and how much time they spent with that content.
Those systems and information aggregation efforts are often called audience analytics, which is effectively a form of audience measurement that was not possible before the internet age. While it comes with its own limitations — for example, this system alone cannot give journalists a clear picture of how people feel about the content they access — it differs from past approaches in that it can gather information about all members of the audience, and that information is not limited to what audiences want to report. It is a more complete record, quantitatively speaking.
These systems can be used to automatically personalize content by linking it to past records of a news consumer’s behavior. For example, if the journalistic organization’s tracking systems know a specific audience member frequently accesses content about Ryan Gosling, it may choose to put that content in more prominent positions on its website (or suggest it as the next article for this user to read) because the system infers from past data that this individual wants to stay on top of news about Ryan Gosling.
Additionally, those systems produce what are often called audience metrics, or aggregate measures about the audience. These include the number of unique people who were exposed to a particular piece of content, where those individuals came from (not just geographically but also the website or platform that led them to that content), and how much time the average person spent with that content, or perhaps even how far the average person scrolled down the page. Thus, a journalist or journalistic organization can have a more quantified sense of how many people read their story and how they interacted with it, instead of just assuming a lot of people did because their group of friends, who likely share the same interests, found it interesting.
Journalists and newsrooms historically marginalized audience measurement data because they often viewed it as an intrusion on their journalistic autonomy and independence. Put another way, drawing on their role orientations and occupational ideology, they would often believe they had to give audiences certain kinds of news — regardless of how popular it might turn out to be — because it was a civic necessity to do so.
While there was always some tension over this, the high profitability of journalism made it easier for journalists to resist perceived intrusions in the past. The combination of these new technologies and the economic challenges faced by commercial media in recent years have resulted in even greater pressure to use audience analytics and metrics to more efficiently cater to audience desires — and made it riskier for journalists to resist such pressures.
Such systems and information do not exist to solely further economic objectives, though. Audience analytics and metrics can and arguably should be used to find ways to better understand what audiences want in order to make civically important content more appealing to them — whether in terms of its substance or simply how and where it is presented, as well as to encourage greater audience engagement and loyalty. Additionally, researchers have found little evidence that highly professionalized newsrooms like The New York Times and The Guardian are blindly making news decisions based on audience metrics alone. Nevertheless, it has become apparent that these technologies and cultural artifacts have changed how journalists think about their work and the ways in which they perform it.