Quantifying Quality: Negotiating Audience Participation and the Value of a Digital Story at NRK

ABSTRACT

The use of metrics and analytics at Norway's national broadcaster, NRK, allows the audience to participate in the news process, impacting story promotion, selection, and formatting. Cognizant of the inherent limitations of quantitative data, NRK created what employees describe as a qualitative analytics system, Janus. Janus was designed in an effort to better measure a digital story's journalistic value, but its use was sporadic. Conversely, analysis of quantitative data significantly impacted editorial decision-making. Discussions surrounding analytics were part of a greater negotiation inside the public broadcaster that challenged traditional ideas surrounding a story's relevance and worth. Through the lens of media logic, with data gathered through ethnographic research and analyzed within a sociological framework, this paper explores how audience participation is changing how the value of a story is measured; the difficulty of developing and using a qualitative analytics system; the resulting prominence placed on quantitative metrics; and the tensions that arise with the use of new technologies that push professional boundaries.

KEYWORDS:

• Audience
• analytics
• data
• digital
• journalism
• media logic
• metrics
• participation

Disclosure Statement

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