Social Media Editors and the Audience Funnel: Tensions between Commercial Pressures and Professional Norms in the Data-Saturated Newsroom

Abstract

This article explores the changing roles of Social Media Editors (SMEs) in the field of journalism, focusing on their unique position as mediators between online news consumers, marketing departments, and newsrooms. Based on in-depth interviews, our findings suggest that, far beyond their origins as comment field moderators, SMEs now play a crucial role in integrating complex behavioral data from social network sites and circulating this data in the newsroom to align news production with perceived audience tastes. Our findings also suggest that while SMEs identify with traditional norms of professional journalism, they also work closely with staff in marketing departments and draw on marketing language and imagery when describing their work. Ultimately, we find that our SME participants experience their increasingly central role in the newsroom in contradictory and ambivalent ways, at times defending traditional professional values, while at other times voicing support for audience sovereignty and giving readers what they want. In this way, if Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory suggests that journalism is structured by an ongoing struggle between exogeneous (commercial and marketing) logics and endogenous professional values, the changing roles of SMEs indicate the arrival of a new stage in this struggle – a stage marked by the deep and virtually uncontested advance of marketing terminology and goals into the journalistic field. In this restructured professional field, individual SMEs are thus left with the difficult task of reconciling, at the level of habitus, internalized tensions between ascendant marketing imperatives and residual but still-cherished journalistic dispositions and values.

Keywords:

• Engagement
• subscription
• digital journalism
• Bourdieu

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We elected to omit journalists from New York and Washington from our sample because the key news outlets in these cities (The New York Times and The Washington Post) operate in unique political and economic environments. The Post enjoys essentially unlimited resources due to its ownership (Amazon’s Jeff Bezos), while the Times enjoys a cultural position at the top of the American prestige press hierarchy and a stable, family-based organizational structure that shields the firm from the economic pressures faced by most American news providers.

2 The interview guide can also be found online at: https://bit.ly/3yzraTo

3 As one SME put it, “we’re going to really try and look at overall, what is getting the traffic and how can we match up our beats to make sure we are covering that best” (Interview 12.27.18).

4 As Cherubini and Nielsen (2016) suggest, the easy slippage between “empower the audience” and consumer sovereignty may be explained by the simple fact that measuring consumer choices is much easier than measuring journalistic quality or the cultural-political impact of news.

5 Interview 12.27.18.

6 Interview 2.1.19.

7 Interview 2.1.19.