What the Metrics Say. The Softening of News on the Facebook Pages of Mainstream Media Outlets

Abstract

The contemporary high-choice media environment, characterized by information abundance, makes it increasingly difficult for media outlets to capture audience attention. This concern is particularly pressing for social media, and more specifically for Facebook. Because user engagement is a crucial input factor for the algorithm, fears have risen that journalistic content on digital news media and especially on social media is becoming softer to help adjust to news consumer’s interests. A content analysis was conducted on four consecutive weeks of all news items published online by five market-leading Belgian media outlets (N = 10,579) in order to analyse whether the news supply is adapted to “what the metrics say” and, subsequently, to what extent that metric data is used to promote a “softer” supply of news on Facebook. To measure audience engagement, we used unique metrics provided by the news organizations themselves. The results show that audience metrics support and enhance news softening on the Facebook pages of mainstream media outlets.

Keywords:

• Facebook
• audience engagement
• metrics
• analytics
• soft news
• content analysis

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the constructive and valuable feedback received from two anonymous reviewers and the Digital Journalism Editorial Team. I’m also grateful for the helpful comments of Steve Paulussen, Peter Van Aelst and the m²p research group meeting on a previous version of this article. At last, the author would like to thank the coders for their hard and meticulous work.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 CIM (Centre of Information on Media, https://www.cim.be/). The reason why we did not include Gazet Van Antwerpen (4^th place) is because this newsroom works in synergy with the editorial staff of Het Nieuwsblad from whom they take most of their national and international reporting.

2 The software systems used to capture the metrics studied in the analysis are Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics and in-house dashboards that among others use Google Analytics as their input channel.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the BOF GOA fund of the University of Antwerp.