Audience Metrics: Operationalizing News Value for the Digital Newsroom

News values in a digital age- Intra-media, inter-media, and extra-media platforms

“…Audience measurements in the newsroom have brought about new news values: 1) The reader criteria, brought about by the ubiquity of audience measurements in the digital newsroom (Hartley, 2012), and 2) Shareability/shareworthiness (Trilling et al, 2017;Harcup & O'Neill, 2017), brought about by the journalists knowing the importance of their news being shared on social media. A third news value of the digital age is linked to the expectancy of algorithmic values: That journalistic newsworthiness is tied to the hope/goal of news stories appearing on extra-media platforms-Facebook Newsfeed, Google Search, Apple News, for example (Kristensen, 2021).…”

Metrics as the new normal – exploring the evolution of audience metrics as a decision-making tool in Swedish newsrooms 1995-2022

“…These methods of questionnaires and tracking devices on a representative sample are still in use. However, digital publishing has brought possibilities for monitoring audience behaviour in a much more voluminous, detailed, and direct way, ultimately feeding back to newsrooms as real-time dashboards, algorithmic actions, and advanced analysis (Carlson, 2018;Kalsnes, 2019;Kristensen, 2021;Lamot and Paulussen, 2020;Moyo et al, 2019;Usher, 2013). Napoli (2010) highlighted several waves of "rationalisation of audience understandings" in the US context: the 1930s wave-driven by advertisers' demand for facts on reach, resulting in systematic reader surveys, and the 1970s wave-driven by technological possibilities of computer-aided statistics.…”

“…These methods of questionnaires and tracking devices on a representative sample are still in use. However, digital publishing has brought possibilities for monitoring audience behaviour in a much more voluminous, detailed, and direct way, ultimately feeding back to newsrooms as real-time dashboards, algorithmic actions, and advanced analysis (Carlson, 2018; Kalsnes, 2019; Kristensen, 2021; Lamot and Paulussen, 2020; Moyo et al, 2019; Usher, 2013).…”

“…Previous studies indicate metrics’ potential to accentuate competing norms on autonomy already embedded in journalism practice, for example, professional news selection versus audience preferences, and the balancing act between editorial values and economic imperatives (Anderson, 2011; Carlson, 2018; Kristensen, 2021; Petre, 2018; Tandoc, 2019). Drawing from a set of professional news quality criteria (e.g.…”

Journalism Education for Datafied Society: Fostering Data (infrastructural) literacy

“…Namely, most of the journalism education renewing has been focused on data journalism while the growing use of audience analytic and metrics has been overlooked in the education of the future journalists. Although significant body of research considers how audience analytics and metrics are changing news work, including journalistic roles (Belair-Gagnon, Zamith, and Holton, 2020), news values (Kristensen, 2021), news judgement (Lamot and Van Aelst, 2020), and journalistic norms and routines (Ekström, Ramsälv and Westlund, 2021), much less attention has been given to this form of datafication in education and on possible ways of preparing future journalists with critical mind set before they enter the actual news rooms.…”