The business of news in the attention economy: Audience labor and MediaNews Group’s efforts to capitalize on news consumption

Abstract

This article analyzes the business of news in the early 21st century through a case study of the US newspaper company MediaNews Group. It examines the company’s efforts over the past decade to create sources of revenue while the US newspaper industry faced a growing financial crisis. This article argues it is necessary to rethink the political economy of news to see that power over news consumption is the foundation of the business of news. The concepts of an attention economy and audience labor are used to reframe the process of capitalizing on news as, fundamentally, a process of gaining power over attention in order to treat it as an exploitable form of audience labor and thereby generate revenue from news consumers or advertisers. This article then presents a study of the strategies for generating revenue used by MediaNews Group from 2006 to 2016, focusing on its clusters of newspapers in California. Ownership consolidation was the company’s key strategy until its debt and the industry’s crisis forced it into bankruptcy. The company then pursued a series of digital strategies: digital advertising, paywalls, mobile distribution, citizen journalism, copyright infringement lawsuits, and Google Consumer Surveys. None proved profitable enough, and in 2016, the company returned to ownership consolidation. MediaNews Group’s efforts over the past decade demonstrate the inescapable truth that power over attention is the key to the business of news: Capitalizing on news requires power over news consumption as a form of attention that can be exploited as news audience labor.

Doomscrolling, Monitoring and Avoiding: News Use in COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown

“…While journalism scholars have recently discussed news in the attention economy as an inroad to study new business models (Myllylahti 2020;Nixon 2020), we focus on the consequences for the users. On a basic level, the business of news operates with user attention as a source of value turned into revenue (Nixon 2020). This is all the more apparent with news providers competing for stickiness and user retention.…”

Procedia of Economics and Business Administration

“…Power concerning attention represents the precondition to the news business as putting information into effect necessitates power regarding news use as a type of attention that can be taken advantage of as news audience labor. [Nixon, 2017] Algorithms harness metrics to regulate topics on social media platforms, newspersons require social media metrics to establish news value and merit, and the operation of intensification is associated with prospects of citizen action via digital interaction. [Zhang et al, 2018] The socialization of news has altered information use processes, while the consumption of news on social network sites may necessitate the advancement of a cutting-edge theoretical approach.…”

“…Attention economy and its target markets refashion the operation of bringing news into play as a mechanism of earning power concerning attention for the purpose of considering it as an available type of audience labor and for that reason producing earnings from news users or advertisers. [Nixon, 2017] The glance familiarizes the news consumer to a certain kind of user behavior and plays the role of a herald to socioeconomic capital [Zulli, 2018]. On social network sites, news posts are deficient in the established informational indications that systematize audience option of narratives, being combined with social reminders as evidence of involvement by other consumers with news items.…”

“…[Zulli, 2018] Power concerning information consumption equates with the infrastructure of the news business. [Nixon, 2017] The undertakings of social media-based target markets may increase the attention addressed to a particular individual or message [Zhang et al, 2018].…”

Habits of practice, habits of thought

“…And, of course, the multifaceted impact of these transformations on the business of journalism has been unmissable. Effects highlighted within these pages have included the reconfiguration of production processes to draw on audience labour (Nixon, 2017) and to align with data from audience analytics (Schlesinger and Doyle, 2015), the conflation of editorial and commercial imperatives and the trend towards closer working relationships between those once-disparate areas (Cornia et al, 2018), and journalists’ own conceptual and performative responses to increasingly precarious conditions of employment (Deuze and Marjoribanks, 2009; Goyanes and Rodríguez-Gómez, 2018).…”