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2011 12: 550JournalismCW Anderson

patterns of newswork in local US newsroomsBetween creative and quantified audiences: Web metrics and changing

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Article

Between creative and quantified audiences: Web metrics and changing patterns of newswork in local US newsrooms

CW AndersonCollege of Staten Island (CUNY), USA

AbstractHow 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? This article explores a provocative tension between the now common rhetorical invocation of the news audience as a ‘productive and generative’ entity, and the simultaneous, increasingly common institutional reduction of the audience to a quantifiable, rationalizable, largely consumptive aggregate. The first half of article reviews the literature on the relationship between audience understanding and newsroom practices. The second half of the article is comprised of an ethnographic analysis of the manner by which increasingly prominent and widespread techniques of audience measurement and quantification interact with the newsroom rhetoric of the active, generative audience. The article concludes with some thoughts regarding the role played by audience quantification and rationalization in shifting newswork practices. It argues that the underlying rhetoric of the active audience can be seen as laying the groundwork for a vision of the professional reporter that is less autonomous in his or her news decisions and increasingly reliant on audience metrics as a supplement to news judgment.

Keywordsaudience 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: [email protected]

Journalism12(5) 550–566

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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 and Anderson, 2005; Mitchelstein and Boczkowski, 2009; Singer, 2008) less has been written about the way that advertisers, marketers, and media executives are constructing the audience for their (increasingly digitized) output. Despite the similar structural forces at work shaping both the journalism industry and the online media industry more generally, and despite the fact that practices of journalism have become increasingly embedded in the overall logic of the media industries (Bourdieu and Ferguson, 1998; Hallin and Mancini, 2004; Klinenberg, 2005; McManus, 1994), there has been little scholarship examining the ways that online technologies – particularly those allowing reporters, 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 these topics might do more than rehash the older (though recently unsettled) conclusions about newsroom 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 analyzing the shifting technological, cultural, and economic conditions inside both traditional and non-traditional Philadelphia area newsrooms. This particular slice of the investigation into shifting forms of 21st-century newswork highlights the way that increasingly ubiq-uitous audience measurement techniques are affecting journalistic culture and editorial decision-making processes. I pay particular attention to a specific puzzle that emerged over 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 the common 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 describe their audiences have important implications for the texts that viewers and readers receive’ (2005: 106), how are journalistic cultures and news production process being shaped by a 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 newsrooms of 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 more than 300 hours of observation at these three newsrooms, and also conducted more than 60 semi-structured interviews with journalists, editors, activists, bloggers, and media executives to gain insight into old and new forms of journalistic work at both traditional and non-traditional media outlets. In general, I followed a methodological approach



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known as grounded theory – a research process that moves from limited theorizing to the collection of data to theorizing once again. In particular, I did not enter the newsroom with the goal of understanding how online audience metrics were affecting journalism; this was a question that emerged as salient only after I entered the newsroom (Becker, 2009). My primary goal during this early period was merely to classify the relevant types of newswork emerging in the new economy of online journalism, and, even then, I did not assume the existence of any particular category of newsworker before I began. To a degree, I adopted a posture of what sociologist Bruno Latour has called ‘deliberate myopia’ (2005) in an attempt to not prejudge the changes in journalism I might encounter. My research in Philadelphia was triangulated through an additional phase of qualitative research, taken in order to better generalize the manner in which online technologies are rationalizing journalists’ understanding of their readers. I conducted a series of open-ended interviews with journalists at the Star-Ledger (of New Jersey), using the conclu-sions derived from my first phase of research in Philadelphia as a jumping off point for additional interviews. The data-gathering for this phase of my larger project spanned the better part of two summers in 2008 and 2009.

In the first half of the article, I review the literature on the relationship between audience understanding, metrics, and newsroom practices. This research, I argue, largely overlooks the way in which changing visions of the audience have been materi-ally embodied within newsroom practices. The second half of the article comprises an ethnographic analysis of manner by which increasingly prominent and widespread techniques of audience measurement and quantification interact with a newsroom rhetoric valorizing an active, generative audience. I conclude by arguing that the underlying rhetoric of the active audience can be seen as laying the groundwork for a vision of the professional reporter that is less autonomous in his or her news decisions and increasingly reliant on audience metrics as a supplement to news judgment.

The news industry construction of the audience: Literature

Many of the changing newsroom behaviors discussed here center around the emergence of new technological artifacts which themselves facilitate new, seemingly precise meth-ods of measuring news consumers’ wants and behaviors. A technologically deterministic perspective on media change would simply attribute changes in editorial practices to the ‘impact’ of these new technologies. Fortunately, newsroom research has largely gone beyond this simple paradigm of technological determinism. In the best theoretical over-view of the relationship between editorial practices and technology to date, Boczkowski (2004) has argued that organizational structures and work practices shape particular forms of technological adoption, adoption which is then further filtered through organi-zational visions of that particular technology (what the technology can do and what it is for), the latent ideals of journalism’s professional culture (the idealized ‘purpose’ of journalistic work), and visions of the audience (who is consuming news content). In short, both new technologies and the ways that journalists envision themselves and their audiences play a role in shaping newsroom practices. I discuss many of these different factors and the role they play in the changes in newswork I observed. Before I begin, however, I summarize the existing literature on the journalism–audience relationship.



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Perhaps the most useful perspective on how audiences are viewed by media makers and media executives, and how this vision of audiences in turn shapes media products and behaviors, can be found in what Turow has called the ‘industrial construction’ of audiences perspective (Ettema and Whitney, 1994; Turow, 2005); ‘the ways that the people who create [media] materials think of’ the people who consume that media, which in turn has ‘important implications for the texts that viewers and readers receive in the first place’ (2005). As Napoli documents in his recent and wide-ranging overview, the overall thrust of most media audience research can be seen as a movement from ‘intui-tive understandings’ to quantitative measurement, occurring under the general rubric of the rationalization of audience understanding.

Within the context of media organizations and media audiences, the notion of the rationalization of audience has involved efforts to bring greater empirical rigor and (primarily) quantitative methods to the process of understanding a range of dimensions of audience behavior [Bogart, 1957; Carey, 1980; Maxwell, 2000] … These efforts have been pursued via the integration of various forms of analytical specialists, the gathering of various forms of (typically quantitative) data, as well as the development of increasingly specialized skill sets. (Napoli, 2010: 73)

There are interesting differences between the manner in which the literature in this media audiences tradition discusses industrial audience construction (seeing it as a pro-cess of increased rationalization punctuated by moments of technological change and group struggle over definitional standards) and the way that the more sociological, largely newsroom-based studies of the news industry have understood journalists’ con-ceptions of their audience (seeing it as an understanding grounded in ignorance and filtered through a lens of professional judgment). According to the vast majority of newsroom-based studies of journalists and audiences, journalistic responsiveness to audience wants and desires has been leavened by journalism’s professional self- conception and its deliberate, technologically enabled ignorance of audience wants. This conventional academic wisdom regarding the relationship between journalists and their audiences has been summed up in Herbert Gans’ landmark study Deciding What’s News (2004). Distinguishing between ‘qualitative’ (letters to the editor and to individual journalists) and ‘quantitative’ (audience research studies) forms of feedback (see also Hermans, 2004), Gans notes that he began his study:

with the assumption that journalists, as commercial employees, take the audience directly into account when selecting and producing news … I was surprised to find, however, that they had little knowledge about the actual audience and rejected feedback from it. Although they had a vague image of the audience, they paid little attention to it; instead, they filmed and wrote for their superiors and themselves, assuming, as I suggested earlier, that what interested them would interest the audience. (2004: 229)

Most of the research from what Zelizer has called the ‘golden era’ of the newsroom ethnography (2004) has echoed Gans’ conclusions (Burgoon et al., 1982; Darnton, 2000; Flegel and Chaffee, 1971; Hermans, 2004; Schlesinger, 1978). ‘Audience images,’ Ettema et al. summarize, ‘seem to have minor influence on journalistic performance rela-tive to other potential influence sources’ (Ettema et al., 1997). And while some scholars




(Beam, 1995; Hujanen, 2008; Pool and Shulman, 1959) have argued that the image of the audience plays a larger role in shaping the news than is assumed by most ethnographers and media sociologists, even these authors have acknowledged that this shaping force is still the product of an ‘incomplete’ understanding of the audience, one that is ‘not keyed in to demographic information’ (DeWerth-Pallmeyer, 1997). Taking Boczkowski’s (2004) overview as a theoretical lens, we might say that journalism’s professional self-conception and its somewhat paternalistic vision of its audience have historically served to blunt the impact of whatever limited audience measurement technologies might influ-ence news production.

Nevertheless, these largely journalism-specific institutional circumstances are evolv-ing rapidly. Indeed, several of the most current studies have revisited this conventional wisdom about journalis–audience relationships and have found it lacking, and each one has found journalistic knowledge of audience’s habits and news preferences to be far more extensive than in the days of Deciding What’s News (Cassidy, 2008; MacGregor, 2007; Outing, 2005; Rogers, 2001). As Outing noted in 2005 (n.p.):

newspaper Web sites … have detailed traffic numbers at their disposal. Today’s news editors know for a fact if sports articles are the biggest reader draw, or if articles about local crimes consistently outdraw political news. They can know how particular stories fared, and track the popularity of news topics.

MacGregor elaborates:

Server logfile data does not require audience intervention because whether the audience realizes it or not, their activity is Logged … prolific use of server logfile data (tracking data) has arisen and developed in almost all publishing houses and editorial organizations consulted … In large media organizations, the journalists obtain the tracking data through a third party, from hired companies such as Omniture, which analyze data from server log files and make results available to the editorial department. It is often then accessed directly on newsroom computers. In some cases journalists report the information has passed through the marketing department. (2007 : 286)

Boczkowski (2010) has contributed a comparative dimension to the (so far, quite limited) research on audience metrics and journalism. In his recent studies of editorial practices at the online news websites Clarin.com and Lanacion.com, he concludes that while online journalists at these papers:

are increasingly aware of the news choices made by consumers of their sites [and] experience a tension between the overall preferences revealed by these choices and dominant occupational values … they tend to stick to these values in the face of dissonant consumer preferences. (2010: 153)

Like MacGregor (whose research analyzed news organizations in the UK) and Boczkowski (whose most recent study was of newspapers in South America), my own analysis of local online news organizations in the United States found evidence of shifting news practices when compared to the older, newsroom-based ethnographic literature. These shifts revolved around a deeper, more intense relationship between



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journalists and their audience, as well as the metrics used by editors and executives to map the behavior of that audience. Here, I document three major trends: first, a rhetorical shift within the news industry towards the notion of the ‘generative, creative audience’; second, a prevalence of technologies that allowed for the quantitative measurement of audiences to an untold degree; and third, the growth of management strategies that emphasized the widespread diffusion of audience metrics. These developments culmi-nated in shifting patterns of news judgment amongst online web producers and other digital newsworkers. Within the context of my own study, at least, the dominant journal-istic values of autonomy and ‘writing for other journalists’ were being encroached upon by a new set of occupational values, a focus on raw audience data, and a ‘culture of the click’. I describe each of these trends before turning, in my conclusion, to a discussion of the relationships between each of them.

Web production and the ‘new newswork’

Philly.com, the website aggregating and repackaging the content of both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, was the primary organizational locale in which I observed the work of web production during my four months in Philadelphia. It is important to note that, under the complex organizational infrastructure of Philadelphia Media Holdings, Philly.com is its own independent institution; it has its own separate building (located on the 35th floor of a non-descript office building at Market Street, and 16th Street in Philadelphia), management, work processes, and culture. At the Star-Ledger, the online staff occupied the same physical space as their print colleagues; nevertheless, even here there was a general feeling of ‘separateness’. Online staffs had their own hierarchies and institutional oversight practices. ‘It’s strange to be in the same newsroom with somebody and know that what you’re doing doesn’t really overlap that much’, one print editor told me (Interview, 18 July 2009).

Over the course of my extended fieldwork in Philadelphia, I came to classify the labor carried out at Philly.com (which I again observed at the both the Star-Ledger and else-where in the Philadelphia news ecosystem) as an emerging, new form of newswork, distinct from ‘traditional’ news practices of reporting, editing, and publishing. I call this form of work ‘web production’, and it is the primary unit of analysis in this study. Web production (which has also been labeled ‘aggregation’ or ‘curation’ by media workers and online commentators) is a complex form of digital newswork, and deserves a more extended elaboration in future research; for now, I want to simply define web producers as journalists engaged in the aggregation, interlinking, bundling, and illustration of web content. The primary tasks of the web producers were to build links between inde-pendently produced news stories and to rank these bundled news stories according to a rapidly changing sense of their importance, popularity, and newsworthiness.

Because this research is both qualitative and ethnographic, it is ultimately impossible to generalize about the forms of newswork that might be emerging in institutions outside of those specifically observed for this study. Nevertheless, there was enough functional overlap in the online organizations that I observed that I feel confident in advancing the conclusions as representative of many of the changes occurring in news organizations as they transition into digital operations. The web producers at these increasingly online




news organizations are engaged in a constant, shifting process of ‘deciding what’s news’ for the hundreds of thousands of daily visitors to their respective websites. They obvi-ously do not make this judgment about what constitutes news insofar as they assign or even write stories, of course, but they do decide about what the most ‘important’ local news story is through their repeated hierarchization and bundling disparate links. In a sense, they tear up and rebuild their digital ‘front pages’ several times an hour.

The contours, texture, and factors contributing to this rapidly deployed news judg-ment would thus seem to warrant closer scrutiny. The remainder of this article argues that a key factor shaping the news judgment of these web producers is a new relationship with the news audience, a relationship based on an increased sensitivity to audience wishes that is both rhetorical and, even more importantly, quantifiable through new online measurement tools.

‘We are not old style journalism’: Web production, user feedback and news judgment

The ‘generative’ audience

The most obvious change in journalistic attitudes towards audiences could be seen in the daily rhetoric and explicit practices of newsroom workers and managers. During my time at Philly.com and the two Philadelphia newspapers, I noticed an increasing emphasis on the creativity and autonomy of journalistic audiences. I also noticed, however, a tension between the image of the audience as articulated by editors, website consultants, and executives (who waxed overwhelmingly positive about audience creativity, generativity, and empowerment) and the attitudes of reporters, which were far more conflicted. When discussing a recent redesign of the Philly.com website, for instance, digital consultants summed up the new attitude toward internet consumers prevalent in much of the market-ing end of the news industry. As one consultant told me:

Philly.com should do what only the web can really do. Brands across the board have shifted. You can’t push from the mountaintop any more … unless you let your users have some kind intimacy with the brand, and maybe even some control, you’re going to fail. They have to play with it. It has to be ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’ (Interview, 30 May 2008)

The web audience, in short, was seen as a generative one. It was active, and had needs and desires. Journalists could no longer assume that their readers were entirely passive.

In addition, a number of actions taken by Philly.com programmers with regard to reader comments shows that the website was trying to take what they perceived to be the generative, audience-empowering nature of the world wide web seriously. While Gans discusses letters and phone calls as qualitative forms of audience feedback, the internet affords readers the ability to comment directly on almost everything they watch and read. The technical possibility of such audience feedback, of course, does not mean that the ability to provide such feedback is inevitable or even widespread. Indeed, executives at Philly.com spoke with pride about the fact that ‘default comments were on all Philly.com articles’ – meaning that readers had the ability to comment on any story, and this ability would have to be taken away by site administrators rather than granted.



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A newsroom manager also took pains to emphasize to me that Philly.com needed to be a useful website in addition to simply an informative one:

I think news people care about a whole pile of headlines, but I think that what we were trying to get in our website was more like, what would help people plan their lives in Philadelphia and live their lives in Philadelphia? So that, yeah, you want to know what the mayor has done, but you also want an idea of what’s going on in town tonight, what’s going on this weekend, what you can do with your life. Audiences are active now. They create things on their own … and ‘news’ is good for building the sustaining interest, but for building utility, to be useful for people, you have to throw all the other stuff in. (Interview, 23 June 2008)

That news workers were increasingly understanding the news audience as generative and participatory could also be seen in a negative sense; for example, in the case of a multi-part story at the Star-Ledger about kidney donors and patients needing kidney transplants. During a discussion of the extensively reported and produced series at the morning editorial meeting, an editor asked if there had been much reader reaction, ‘Not a hell of a lot,’ came the reply in tones of disappointment, ‘We’ve only just started includ-ing information on how to contact [the writer] today, and she’s just starting to get email she hasn’t gotten during the series so far … [the writer] will be disappointed more people aren’t interacting with her story’ (fieldwork, 12 July 2009). Throughout my time in Philadelphia and Newark, I heard a steady drumbeat of commentary regarding the empowerment of audiences, the creativity of audiences, the fact that audience prefer-ences needed to be taken into account, and the fact that audiences were ‘partners’ with journalists in the creation and consumption of journalism.

Nevertheless, news reporters (as opposed to news executives and website consultants) displayed a welter of more contradictory attitudes towards the empowerment of audience members. ‘Philadelphia is really full of a bunch of boorish jerks,’ one journalist said out loud after reviewing a series of particularly nasty comments on one article. Philly.com interns, aided by an aggressive spam-filtering system (so aggressive that it censored comments discussing Iraqi ‘Shiites’, for instance), worked to keep articles clean, but were often unsure about the line between passion and abuse. Other journalists were curious about their readers: ‘I’m interested in who is leaving comments,’ a city hall reporter told me one morning (fieldwork, 19 June 2008). Still other journalists mostly ignored the commenters, dismissing them as unrepresentative of the bulk of their reader-ship. ‘You have to understand, these are people that have nothing better to do than surf the internet at 11am,’ one journalist confided to me in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘They’re losers.’ Many other journalists (and even some of those that tried to simultaneously dis-miss reader feedback) were upset by rude or vulgar reader posts, feeling that such reader comments reflected poorly on themselves as journalists or the articles to which the comments were attached. The line between article and reader feedback, in other words, was not always clear to reporters. In many ways, they seemed to regard comments to articles as affecting the professionalism and neutrality of the articles they themselves had written, even though the difference between comment and article seems clear enough to outside observers.

There were equally contradictory attitudes about the degree to which reporters and bloggers should bother to engage their readers in the comments sections of articles,




though attitudes seemed to be shifting, over time, towards more audience engagement. In the early days of newspaper blogging, a popular writer told me, his online editor told him that ‘the blogger is the voice of god, and you’re lowering your status if you engage your readers. I was told that it would be bad if I spent my entire day … Arguing with people in the comments section.’ This blogger soon changed his mind. At this point, he con-cluded, the ability to get a conversation going with creative, generative commenters depended more on ‘how much time I have than anything else’ (fieldwork, 23 June 2008).

As one veteran news editor in Philadelphia pointed out, however, journalistic attitudes towards reader comments weren’t all that different than earlier attitudes towards letter and phone calls. In an echo of Gans’ findings, journalists were simultaneously curious about and dismissive of their audience; when faced with unpleasant or jarring reader feedback, they often argued that the readers leaving comments were an unrepresentative minority. The primary difference between the journalists observed during the wave of newsroom ethnographies in the 1970s and today centered on newsroom expectations of audience members. Whereas reporters were once surprised by reader feedback, it seems that they now expect reader feedback, even if they do not like it, agree with it, or see it as enhancing their ultimate journalistic product.

If discussions of how journalists should relate to their newly empowered audience were only centered around visions of the active audience and audience feedback, we might simply chalk the perspectives up to differences in the attitudes of newsroom managers and ‘on the ground’ reporters, and move on. However, qualitative audience impact, in the form of comments and other ‘user generated content’, was not the pri-mary manner in which the audience seemed to be affecting news routines. Rather, technological developments allowing for instantaneous audience metrics and news-room management strategies that emphasized the widespread diffusion of these metrics marked the primary axial shift in the journalist–audience relationship. And when it came to questions of the role of audience metrics and traffic figures, much of the ambi-guity expressed by journalists with regard to their audiences disappeared. They, much like newsroom managers, were obsessed with ‘traffic’.

Web metrics, management strategy, and news judgment

We can begin by looking again at the impact of user comments, this time from a new angle. While discussions of user commenting at Philly.com partially concerned the qual-ity of user dialog, they primarily revolved around the number of comments and the man-ner in which commenting was affecting website traffic overall. The following PowerPoint slide (see Figure 1), which was distributed to all employees and documented the impact of making comments ‘default on’ on all articles, is fairly typical. In effect, much of the discussion about comments concerned their ability to generate website hits.

Based on this slide, which was widely displayed during public presentations discuss-ing the Philly.com website, editors and managers concluded that comments were a useful way to generate traffic to the Philly.com website. Such an increase in traffic argued for a continuation of the default ‘comments-on’ policy.

One of the most interesting things about working at Philly.com, a company executive told me, was that ‘you get constant feedback on your work … and I don’t mean emails,



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I mean constant exposure to traffic’ (fieldwork, 25 June 2008). Editors at Philly.com and its affiliated Philadelphia newspapers, as well as editors at the Star-Ledger, utilized a system called Omniture to track their visitor data and, quite often, made major editorial decisions based on website traffic numbers. The simple existence of a tracking technol-ogy did not mandate its use, however – observations showed that the strategic use of web stats were part of a deliberate strategy for online management in some newsrooms, (the ones in Philadelphia) while the diffusion of web stats was less common in other newsrooms, for instance, at the Star-Ledger.

Knowledge of website traffic was widely available for journalists in Philadelphia who wanted it. During my time at the Philadelphia Inquirer, I was approached by one online newsworker clutching pages of Omniture website data in his hand. This reporter hand me a page of ‘click counts’, sorted by author name. ‘We’re probably headed toward a new model where reporters get paid by clicks,’ the reporter said darkly, only half in jest. ‘People who are concerned with their careers know these things, but most people still aren’t concerned with stats, but I am.’ The reporter then told me about a powerfully writ-ten, extensively researched Philadelphia Inquirer story about a local army company that ‘just bombed on the website, it just did terrible. You want to throw fear in to the hearts of journalism professionals? That’s a way’ (fieldwork, 11 July 2008).

A producer at Philly.com echoed this sentiment:

Even when I first came here, we had a much cruder system [to measure traffic], but we had skilled programmers … and we would get emails in the middle of the day which would be about which stories were doing well, and we would take them to the news meetings [of the papers] and I think they were a little shocked a lot of the time, because even then we knew that a lot more people clicked on the gossip story than clicked on your story, which you spent all this time investigating. That was maybe not something readers cared about as much. Papers don’t have that same way of following what it is people care about.

Figure 1. Number of comments on Philly.com articles




But in the old days, we thought different things were more important than they are. You know a lot of [story selection] used to go by editor’s interests. And of course maybe we went more with the paper and what it’s strong with also, as opposed to looking at traffic reports. And realizing exactly what people click on. And you know, I’ve always had this argument – because I did work on the Knight-Ridder national news team – I’ve always had this argument that just because people are not going to click on a story about Iraq doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a headline up there. Because some people just want to read the headline. And it just makes you look bad if you’re a big news site and you don’t have the right news there. … And I think we always knew that sports was big, and gossip was big, and big talker stories were big, but, when we saw the cold numbers … I think that was kind of when a lot of people woke up. (Interview, 23 July 2008)

‘The bottom line is, we are not old style journalism,’ a Philly.com executive said. But such old style journalism was no longer even possible, he continued, proceeding to tell a story about a Philadelphia Inquirer report on a special eye virus that brought sight back to the blind. ‘It was an amazing story, or rather, it was an amazing whole package of stories. But it bombed. It got no traffic. And it was then that I realized we’re in a new world’ (interview, 26 June 2008). ‘The data shows our sports page is really our second homepage,’ another website executive told me. Indeed, a June breakdown of traffic per-centages for the year to date showed traffic to the Philly.com homepage accounting for 17.2 percent of all hits, followed by the Eagles Forum (2.9%), Philly.com/sports (2.4%), and the Philadelphia Inquirer homepage (2.3%) – and that was before the start of Philadelphia Eagles season and before the Philadelphia World Series win. As further evidence that a focus on metrics was part of a deliberate newsroom management strat-egy, the top Philly.com stories as of the end of May were collected and distributed to staffers as an Excel spreadsheet (Figure 2).

Website traffic numbers, no matter what the content of actual clicked articles, were invoked often at the Philadelphia Inquirer and almost obsessively at Philly.com. ‘We hit 35.8 million in November,’ went a typical presentation about the new website to the news staff, ‘37.9 million in December, 38.8 million in January, 42.1 million in April, 39.1 mil-lion in May, and 33.9 million in June’ (fieldwork, 25 June 2008). This is not good news on traffic, the presenter continued:

We’re in a summer slump – and we aggressively need to find a way to end it. We will protect our growth in page views! Everybody here should be thinking ‘what can I get to Philly.com now’ in terms of content. And what can I add to the story that’s good for the web. There should be an urgency around the idea of sending stuff to Philly.com.

There was a similar rhetoric about page views during staff meetings at Philly.com. ‘We’re trending low for the day,’ went a typical summer meeting. ‘But, uniques were up for the day.’ And so on. This would then be followed by a discussion amongst the group as to why numbers were down – perhaps it has to do with vacations in the summertime, one producer might suggest. ‘Either way, it can’t last’ (fieldwork, 23 June 2008).

Even outside official meetings, traffic patterns played a major role in the selection of stories for Philly.com. ‘I just pulled this story off the spotlight, it was underperforming, it only had 137 page views’ was a common phrase to hear shouted across the Philly.com office. One web producer told me:



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Figure 2. Online web statistics report, Philly.com

Usually I give a story at least an hour to prove itself. 500 page views is pretty good, and 1000 is great. It’s easier to compare story traffic in the morning when everything goes up at the same time. Then you can basically compare different articles with each other. The afternoon, when things are more erratic, it’s tougher to compare. (Interview, 30 June 2008)

It is not an exaggeration to say that website traffic often appeared to be the primary ingredient in Philly.com news judgment. MacGregor argues that ‘[although] data are directly revising the way “news values” are implemented in the respondent sample, over-all, social and organizational context rather than technology alone shape the way these online professionals react to their new tool’ (2007). My own ethnographic research, how-ever, demonstrates that Philly.com lacked a strong organizational culture that could miti-gate against the dominance of a website management strategy based on clicks. I probed this topic in three ways during my conversations with Philly.com web producers and newspaper journalists. ‘Is there an organizational culture that can mitigate the primacy of web statistics when it comes to choosing stories?’ I first asked bluntly. Rephrasing my




question somewhat during later interviews, I put forward the following hypothetical sce-nario: Say that a tech staffer came up with a way to automate the Philly.com website so well-trafficked stories were automatically placed in the biggie, spotlight, and trio slots. What would be left for a web producer to do? Finally, I simply asked: what’s the perfect Philly.com story? ‘The adventures of Bonnie and Clyde [two young, attractive area col-lege students charged with identity theft] were the perfect Philly.com story. A story that is going to get tons of hits, and is going to elicit a lot of comments’ (Fieldwork, 2 July 2008). A web producer said in response to one of my questions:

Is there a news culture at Philly.com yet? Let’s put it this way: if there was, the personnel has changed so much I think there probably isn’t any more. Literally in the last couple of months, there’s four of us on the entire team who are not new, and the bosses are new. (Fieldwork, 9 July 2008)

A second web producer said:

Occasionally we’ll buck the trend towards click thinking, if there’s a strong local news story or breaking news – we tend to do it more with breaking news – or if there’s good stuff in the paper. But, in general, moving away from click driven thinking is the exception. (Fieldwork, 22 July 2008)

We’re trying to be a real strong local news site that appeals to our audience and gets traffic. You just sort of get used to knowing what kind of news gets clicked. A story about the Middle East, a national story – no. We’re trying to pick out strong local stories or strong state stories that we know will appeal to our readership. We’re a news site, but we don’t feel tied to the definition of news, as in breaking news. As far as the spotlight versus the biggie goes, it’s intuitive, but we just put about anything we think will get clicked up there at this point. You just have a gut feeling about it. Like for an article about Michelle Obama: your gut instinct is that it’s not going to get picked up, but if it’s getting clicked we’ll bump it up. (Interview, 22 July 2008)

At the Star-Ledger, the upper hierarchies of the newsroom staff appeared to be just as tuned in to web traffic statistics and patterns as their Philadelphia counterparts; however, they placed less of an emphasis on using these stats as a management tool. This adds an important nuance to the previous discussion of the impact of news metrics to themselves. There was no deliberate diffusion of metric data; indeed, the editors seemed to keep web-site data from the newsroom. During the morning editorial meeting, for instance, one of the papers’ managing editors often pulled up an Omniture web report prior to the start of the meeting; however, there was virtually no discussion during the meeting of clicks, ‘hit counts’, or other traffic patterns. At the same time, editors were clearly adjusting their understanding of ‘what counted’ as a good news story based on the quantified behavior of website readership. Editors stressed to me the importance of news judgment that reflected a traffic-oriented focus on web behavior. It was a judgment reflected in the placement of stories online in correspondence with daily traffic patterns (‘hook them in the morning and keep them coming back’), in the use of graphics (‘they were an attractive criminal couple, and the use of their photograph online made a big difference … and so I was disappointed when we didn’t use head shots in the printed paper), and in the construction of actual sto-ries (‘we’re doing a lot fewer anecdotal ledes online, and are seeing a return of the inverted pyramid’). Nevertheless, they largely kept these judgments to themselves.



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In sum, the sudden availability of news metrics were making journalists and editors more sensitive to the implications of what their audience was reading and why. In Philadelphia, a deliberate management emphasis on the widespread diffusion of metric data along with a fairly desperate need for greater traffic numbers that could boost online ad revenues were leading web producers at Philly.com to base more and more of their news judgments on raw, quantitative data. In Newark, there was less of a reliance on metrics, at least on the part of everyday reporters. And in both places there was – in addition to a reliance on metrics – a rhetorical valorization of the audience, despite these differing uses of quantitative measurement data. What factors might account for these simultaneous differences and similarities? Can such specific findings be usefully gener-alized in any way? I want to conclude by arguing that the underlying rhetoric of the active audience might be seen as laying the groundwork for a vision of the professional reporter that is less autonomous in his or her news decisions, and increasingly reliant on audience metrics as a supplement to news judgment.

Discussion and conclusion

Through triangulated fieldwork at news production sites in Philadelphia, PA, and Newark, NJ, this article has examined a new category of newswork – web production – and has documented how the changing visions of the audience afforded by new digital communications technologies are changing the work practices of these new newswork-ers. Whereas earlier newsroom sociology emphasized the submersion of audience-centered news judgments in favor of professional codes, the research discussed has documented that the process of ‘deciding what’s news’ is increasingly influenced by quantitative audience measurement techniques. These findings are in line with a stream of literature, largely separate from traditional newsroom sociology that emphasizes the progressive quantification of audience understanding. This research also sheds light on the frequent valorization of the ‘generative’ audience inside newsrooms, finding that this rhetoric of creativity is usually subsumed by a vision of the audience that is numerical and highly quantified. These findings also add nuance to earlier findings about the rela-tionship between audience metrics and newsroom practices, which have seen a greater persistence of journalism’s professional values (e.g. Boczkowski, 2010; MacGregor, 2007). What might account for the variations I observed in my own research?

The differing uses of news metrics in Philadelphia and Newark can provide some initial insights into this phenomenon. Returning to Boczkowski’s outline of the relation-ship between technology and newsroom behavior discussed earlier in this article, we might say that variations at the level of institutional management strategy – with manag-ers in Philadelphia placing a far greater emphasis on website traffic and purposefully encouraging the diffusion of news metrics – were a major factor in influencing changing editorial practices. In situations where technologies, the overall business climate, and basic journalistic cultures remain constant, specific managerial decisions play an important role in determining how audience measurement technologies will be used to encourage or discourage certain forms of newsroom behavior. This finding, while far from earth shattering, does helpfully direct our attention to the importance of site-specific news practices during this period of journalistic transition.




Nevertheless, I also think there are deeper currents at work here, and I think the key to understanding them is to remember the growth of a rhetoric of empowered audiences along with the uneven adoption of news metric technologies. Recall that a major factor in journalists’ visions of their audiences has always been journalists’ visions of them-selves. The key role played by occupational professionalism was a major determining factor for Gans and the other newsroom sociologists of the so-called ‘golden age’, and the continued persistence of these values has been noted by both MacGregor and Boczkowski. My own research has pointed to the continued currency of a certain notion of journalistic professionalism as well. At the same time, however, this professional self-conception is slowly changing, and changing in ways that are visible when we analyze the rhetoric about active, empowered, generative audiences, a rhetoric that emerges in parallel to the increased reliance on news metrics.

The key purpose of this article was to explore what I saw as a tension in this vision of audience empowerment and a growth in audience quantification. It may be, however, that there is actually no tension at all. Rather than rhetoricizing audiences as passive consumers of news that needed to be given ‘the information they needed’ by professional journalists, news consumers were increasingly being discussed as creative, active par-ticipants in the news-making process that needed to be simultaneously empowered, catered to, and captured for analytical measurement purposes. In this sense, we can see the tension between an empowered, active audience and a measured audience resolve at the level of increasing quantification.

In conclusion, a vision-empowered news consumer can mean many different things depending on the circumstances under which it is articulated, and the particular form of audience empowerment observed in this research might be seen as laying the ground-work for a deeper reliance on audience metric data as a determining factor in news production. The preferences of active audiences, in other words, need to be measured and taken into account. Reporters might still resist deeper audience participation in, and feedback on, the news production process (as seen in the general distaste for audience comments on articles discussed earlier), but journalists can at least be expected to honor audiences insofar as they are taught to respect quantitative feedback about what it is that audiences want. Obviously, only further empirical work can support these rather broad speculations. Nevertheless, a focus on the widely divergent ways that the rhetoric of ‘Web 2.0’ in general – and ‘empowered audiences’ in particular – is actually deployed in specific newsrooms, and the deeply material manner in which this rhetoric is made manifest in daily news practices, might be a useful lens for future research.

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Philip M. Napoli, Nikki Usher, Seth Lewis, two anonymous review-ers with the International Communication Association, and two anonymous reviews with Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Note

1 In the fall of 2009, Philadelphia Media Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. While this development obviously plays a major role in my overall research project, I do not discuss its implications here.



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Biographical notes

CW Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island (CUNY). From 2009 to 2011 he was a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP).



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