Becoming the Data-Informed Newsroom? The Promotion of Audience Metrics in the Newsroom and Journalists' Interactions with Them

Abstract

In this article, we assess the interactions between user metrics and journalists, as newsrooms shift towards "data-informed" models in which the main online news performance indicator becomes the "time spent" metric, instead of the number of clicks. The paper at hand applies a mixed methods approach combining components of ethnographic participant observation inside the newsroom of a leading Belgian newspaper, and a quantitative analysis of the media company's overarching internal data platform. This approach allows us to shed light on user data of not one, but four very differentiated newspapers. Our results confirm that (a) journalists tend to remain hesitant at best and fearful at worst in accepting user data as an integral part of their daily work, (b) attempts of increasing the "time spent" in articles only rarely seem to pay off, and (c) the relationship between journalism and metrics cannot be assessed without properly addressing and tackling other existing gaps and differences between (groups of) journalists and titles under the same company.