Participative Gatekeeping: The Intersection of News, Audience Data, Newsworkers, and Economics

Abstract

The use of metrics and analytics is becoming pervasive in newsrooms the world over. However, there is a lack of consistent terminology in scholarly literature with regards to such practice and a dearth of studies that compare practice on a wider scale that prevents more holistic understanding of how audience data are being used on the newsroom floor. These issues are addressed with the development of a new participative gatekeeping model with three previously unidentified channels of gatekeeping specifically related to the use of audience data: promotional, for the type of short-term gatekeeping done on news site homepages that involves tracking real-time metrics to position content, often tied to traffic targets; developmental, or longer-term strategies that shape future coverage and are grounded in hypotheses of audience behaviour gleaned from analytics; and a third more porous channel of experimentation where such hypotheses are tested. These channels were observed in ethnographic research in six newsrooms in three different countries at media outlets with diverse sources of revenue: Norway’s public broadcaster, NRK; Canada’s subscriber-based national news agency, The Canadian Press (CP); and two local newsrooms working within larger media organizations, The Hamilton Spectator in Canada, and The Bournemouth Daily Echo in England. Through a sociological lens, this article distinguishes language to best document the complex processes interconnected with audience data, identifies similarities in practice that override media or revenue systems, and explores how the audience, through the participatory mechanisms of metrics and analytics, shapes newsroom practice.

Keywords:

• Analytics
• audience
• digital
• gatekeeping
• journalism
• media logic
• metrics
• technology

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 As defined by Bourdieu (1996; 2005; Willig 2013): A specific way of “playing” the news game dependent on factors such as one’s own personal experience, work environment/role in an organization, and level of seniority.

2 Torstar was being sold at the time of the writing of this paper.

3 CP did not have a direct-to-audience website but enhanced stories on its social media feeds; audience data were gathered from social media analytics, URL shortening tools, and embed codes in graphics used by subscribers.

4 The term “doing well” was also noted by Tandoc (2019) in research going back as far as 2013.

5 The influence of online analytics on print content was also seen in a study on African newsrooms (Moyo et al. 2019), as was tension between popularity and public interest.

6 Tandoc and Jenner (2016) similarly observed that “newsrooms currently distinguish between two applications of web analytics data: to plan stories and coverage; and to package stories in the website“ (433).

7 Acknowledging that technology such as bots can distort data.