Web analytics and the functional differentiation of journalism cultures: individual, organizational and platform-specific influences on newswork

ABSTRACT

A key development in journalism over the past decade has been the rise of web analytics for real-time measurement of how audiences respond to news content. While this has led to concerns that analytics may contribute to a dumbing down of news, our understanding of the impact analytics have on journalism culture is still limited. This study explores individual, organizational and platform-specific influences on ways in which journalists and newsrooms access, use, interpret and apply analytics in their daily work. It argues that, increasingly, analytics are beginning to shape and reshape journalistic roles, values, norms and practices across different types of newsrooms. These developments are contributing to processes of functional differentiation in the journalistic field, which is found particularly in emerging practices of day- and platform-parting. The study argues that this differentiation has important consequences for scholars wanting to study news production, distribution and content in the digital age.

KEYWORDS:

• Analytics
• metrics
• journalism
• market orientation
• differentiation
• platform-parting

Notes on contributor

Folker Hanusch is Professor of Journalism at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is also an adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology. His research interests include comparative journalism studies, transformations of journalism culture, lifestyle journalism, Indigenous journalism and journalism and memory. He has published 4 books and more than 40 peer-reviewed journal articles on these topics [email: [email protected]].

ORCiD

Folker Hanusch http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7344-0483