The Audience-Oriented Editor

Abstract

Spurred by the increasingly central role of audience metrics in the editorial process, a new set of roles is being introduced in the newsroom primarily focused on navigating audience data. This paper aims to understand these emerging audience-oriented roles and to what extent considerations of the audience figures in editorial choices. This paper draws from a set of 15 in-depth interviews with engagement editors, social media editors and audience editors from different media systems around the world. Three major findings emerge: First, the definition of engagement is almost entirely centered on different types of metrics. Second, while audienceoriented editors take part in the editorial process, their role is to help journalists negotiate between the information obtained by their metrics and their journalistic intuition to make editorial decisions. Third, there is a lack of cohesiveness regarding what these newsroom positions are and how they operate. The paper contributes to the growing literature on the pervasiveness of metrics and quantification of journalistic processes by offering a more nuanced understanding of a new set of editorial roles.

What’s New about Whatsapp for News? A Mixed-Method Study on News Outlets’ Strategies for Using WhatsApp

“…Thus, audience engagement is an interesting perspective for research on WhatsApp for news. The term is used in varying ways and connected to concepts of participation and citizen journalism as well as more datadriven approaches such as audience metrics (Meier, Kraus, and Michaeler 2018;Lawrence, Radcliffe, and Schmidt 2018;Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc 2018;Cherubini and Nielsen 2016). Loosen (2016) differentiates between three different ways of how journalists integrate the audience in the editorial process: as an economically motivated strategy to build audience loyalty (editorial analytics), as a chance to enrich diversity in public discourse (participation) andbecoming apparent more recentlyas a challenge originating from hate speech, propaganda, and other unwanted content posted online.…”

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“…Several scholars have raised explicit concerns about the lack of concrete definitions of engagement (Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc 2018;Meier, Kraus, and Michaeler 2018;Nelson 2018). However, scholarship on audience engagement often agrees that it "refers to the cognitive, emotional, or affective experiences that users have with media content or brands" (Broersma 2019, 1).…”

“…However, marshalling data in this way conflates what metrics actually do (a system logic that aggregates measurable digital signals, and correlates this with pre-existent data through models, algorithms, and machine learning) with what they seem to imply (a market logic that hopes to predict people's preferences and predispositions). Within journalism studies, researchers have been preoccupied with the connections between audience metrics, engagement and news, arguing that engagement is a significant factor for the business models of digital-born and legacy news media (e.g., Batsell 2015;Nelson and Webster 2016), and that newsroom practices are increasingly shaped by the analysis of audience metrics in order to create news suited to engage the audience (e. g. Cherubini and Nielsen 2016;Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc 2018;Zamith, Belair-Gagnon, and Lewis 2019) even though the adoption of audience metrics in newsrooms might have been slower and less universal than first assumed (Nelson and Tandoc 2019). In recent years, new roles such as "engagement editor", "engagement reporter", "head of audience engagement" and similar titles have emerged in newsrooms, predominantly in the US, the UK and Australia.…”

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“…data that ANR use actually mirrors the true preferences and needs of the user, or that they are outweighed by other signals and optimization benchmarks (e.g. preferences of advertisers, the editorial team, values on the side of technology developers) [86,87]. Zamith points to the importance of distinguishing between construed and real audiences as 'the former might reflect the latter poorly' [82].…”