Six Uses of Analytics: Digital Editors’ Perceptions of Audience Analytics in the Newsroom

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how digital news editors perceive the uses and implications of audience analytics in contemporary digital newsrooms. Based on 21 interviews with digital news editors at 11 Belgian news organisations, including 7 national newspapers, one news magazine, one public and one commercial broadcaster, and one digital-born news medium, the study shows how audience analytics have become normalised in these digital newsrooms and how, in the perception of those who use them, tools for capturing audience behaviour data inform and shape their daily work practices and organisational strategies. Combining insights from literature with empirical findings, the study distinguishes six uses of audience analytics: Not only do analytics inform editorial decisions on (1) story placement, (2) story packaging, (3) story planning and (4) story imitation, but they can also serve as instruments for (5) performance evaluation and (6) audience conception. Overall, the digital news editors are convinced that audience analytics support rather than harm their journalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Audience analytics tools
• digital media
• web metrics
• social media
• computational journalism
• newsroom management
• innovations

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the organisers of the ICA 2018 Audience Analytics Pre-conference for their feedback while presenting an earlier draft of this article and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Research Fund of the University of Antwerp.