http://jou.sagepub.com/content/12/5/550Theonline version of this article can be foundat:DOI: 10.1177/14648849114024512011 12: 550
Journalism
CW Anderson
patterns of newswork in local US newsroomsBetween creative and quantified audiences: Web metrics and changing
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Article
Between creative andquantified audiences: Web metrics and changingpatterns of newswork inlocal US newsrooms
CW Anderson
College of Staten Island (CUNY), USA
Abstract
How are transformations in newswork intersecting with changes in the monitoring of reader behavior and new technologies of audience measurement? How, in short, are journalistic ‘visions of the audience’ shifting in the online era, and how are they enablingparticular editorial practices? This article explores a provocative tension betweenthe now common rhetorical invocation of the news audience as a ‘productive andgenerative’ entity, and the simultaneous, increasingly common institutional reduction of the audience to a quantifiable, rationalizable, largely consumptive aggregate. The firsthalf of article reviews the literature on the relationship between audience understandingand newsroom practices. The second half of the article is comprised of an ethnographicanalysis of the manner by which increasingly prominent and widespread techniques of audience measurement and quantification interact with the newsroom rhetoric of theactive, generative audience. The article concludes with some thoughts regarding the roleplayed by audience quantification and rationalization in shifting newswork practices. Itargues that the underlying rhetoric of the active audience can be seen as laying thegroundwork for a vision of the professional reporter that is less autonomous in his orher news decisions and increasingly reliant on audience metrics as a supplement to news judgment.
Keywords
audience metrics, gatekeeping, news production, online journalism, professionalism,ratings
Corresponding author:
CW Anderson, Department of Media Culture, Building 1P, 2600 Victory Blvd, Staten Island, New York 10314, USAEmail: christopher.anderson@csi.cuny.edu
Journalism12(5) 550–566© The Author(s) 2011Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1464884911402451 jou.sagepub.com
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Anderson
551
Introduction and methodology
While transformations in the production processes of journalism have been well docu-mented in the academic literature (Anderson, 2008; Domingo et al., 2008; Lowrey andAnderson, 2005; Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009; Singer, 2008) less has beenwritten about the way that advertisers, marketers, and media executives are constructingthe audience for their (increasingly digitized) output. Despite the similar structuralforces at work shaping both the journalism industry and the online media industry moregenerally, and despite the fact that practices of journalism have become increasinglyembedded in the overall logic of the media industries (Bourdieu and Ferguson, 1998;Hallin and Mancini, 2004; Klinenberg, 2005; McManus, 1994), there has been littlescholarship examining the ways that online technologies – particularly those allowingreporters, editors, and newsroom executives to rationalize knowledge of their audience(Napoli, 2010) via the monitoring of reader behavior and traffic on their news websites – are shaping and transforming long-standing journalistic conventions. Research on thesetopics might do more than rehash the older (though recently unsettled) conclusions aboutnewsroom gatekeeping; it might also shed light on the relationships between techno-logical objects and news production processes, as well as add nuance to descriptions of the shifting conditions of newswork in local news ecologies.The research presented in this article is part of a larger ethnographic study analyzingthe shifting technological, cultural, and economic conditions inside both traditional andnon-traditional Philadelphia area newsrooms. This particular slice of the investigationinto shifting forms of 21st-century newswork highlights the way that increasingly ubiq-uitous audience measurement techniques are affecting journalistic culture and editorialdecision-making processes. I pay particular attention to a specific puzzle that emergedover the course of my research: the tension between the common rhetorical invocation of the news audience as a ‘productive and generative’ entity, and the simultaneous, increas-ingly common institutional reduction of the audience to a quantifiable, rationalizable,largely consumptive aggregate. What should we think about this tension between thecommon tendency of reporters and editors to see their audiences as
both
creative
and
measurable? If, as Turow argues, ‘the ways media organizers search for and describetheir audiences have important implications for the texts that viewers and readers receive’(2005: 106), how are journalistic cultures and news production process being shaped bya description of an audience that is at once both generative and highly quantified?To compile the ethnographic data used in the research that follows, I undertook a period newsroom-based fieldwork in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with direct observa-tions completed primarily between May and August 2008. I spent time in the newsroomsof the
Philadelphia Daily News
(the city tabloid) and
Philadelphia Inquirer
(a broad-sheet), as well as in what was jokingly known as the ‘not-quite newsroom’ of
Philly.com
,a stand-alone website aggregating content from both papers. All three papers are owned by the same local company, Philadelphia Media Holdings.
1
All in all, I completed morethan 300 hours of observation at these three newsrooms, and also conducted more than60 semi-structured interviews with journalists, editors, activists, bloggers, and mediaexecutives to gain insight into old and new forms of journalistic work at both traditionaland non-traditional media outlets. In general, I followed a methodological approach
at COLLEGE OF STATEN ISLAND on May 29, 2012 jou.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Between Creative and Quantified Audiences
How are transformations in newswork intersecting with changes in the monitoring of reader behavior and new technologies of audience measurement? How, in short, are journalistic “visions of the audience” shifting in the online era, and how are they enabling particular editorial practices?
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