Journalism Practice

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Six Uses of Analytics: Digital Editors’ Perceptions of

Audience Analytics in the Newsroom

Kenza Lamot & Steve Paulussen

To cite this article: Kenza Lamot & Steve Paulussen (2020) Six Uses of Analytics: Digital Editors’
Perceptions of Audience Analytics in the Newsroom, Journalism Practice, 14:3, 358-373, DOI:
10.1080/17512786.2019.1617043

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2019.1617043

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JOURNALISM PRACTICE
2020, VOL. 14, NO. 3, 358–373
https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2019.1617043

Six Uses of Analytics: Digital Editors’ Perceptions of Audience

Analytics in the Newsroom
Kenza Lamot and Steve Paulussen
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article investigates how digital news editors perceive the uses Audience analytics tools;
and implications of audience analytics in contemporary digital digital media; web metrics;
newsrooms. Based on 21 interviews with digital news editors at social media; computational
journalism; newsroom
11 Belgian news organisations, including 7 national newspapers,
management; innovations
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.

Journalists’ understanding of the audience has become increasingly more refined and
data-driven throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In today’s digital news
environment, media organisations can now constantly monitor news users’ behaviour
on their websites and social media platforms (Napoli 2011; Hanusch 2017). Newsrooms
worldwide have been implementing audience analytics, tools that provide their journalists
with real-time metrics and quantified knowledge about the online behaviours and prefer-
ences of their website’s visitors, based on observational data about how users land on their
pages, how much time they spend reading articles, which headlines they click on, which
topics they are interested in, and so on (Lee and Tandoc 2017).
While the increased use of audience analytics in journalism has been mapped in several
studies across different countries (Bright and Nicholls 2014; Cherubini and Nielsen 2016),
research on how these tools affect the daily work organisation and strategies inside the
newsroom is still rather limited. First studies in this area have mainly focused on how audi-
ence analytics influence the provision and positioning of news stories on media websites
(Lee, Lewis, and Powers 2012; Tandoc 2014; Vu 2014) and how the quantification of news
user behaviour impacts on journalists’ relationship with and perceptions about their public

CONTACT Kenza Lamot [email protected]

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 JOURNALISM PRACTICE 359

(Anderson 2011). Later studies also focused on the practical, organisational and ethical
implications of audience analytics for news work (Tandoc and Jenner 2015, 2016;
Tandoc and Thomas 2015; Hanusch 2017) and on the impact of analytics on journalists’
professional role perceptions (Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc 2018). Most of these studies
contain a warning for potential “dumbing down” effects of audience analytics. There is
indeed the risk of a shift from an editorial to an algorithmic logic in the news-making
process, which may intensify tendencies towards news commodification and the “market-
isation” of journalism (Tandoc and Thomas 2015; Tandoc and Vos 2016). However, as
Zamith (2018) concludes from his literature review, both scholars and practitioners
seem to replace, or complement, their initial scepticism with a more pragmatic view
that also recognises “more nuanced effects and prosocial possibilities”. Yet, Zamith also
notes that several questions are still unresolved, such as the question of how audience
analytics are modifying journalists’ professional routines and norms or how the “quantitat-
ive turn” in journalism is affecting the “allocation of capital within newsrooms” (2018, 430;
see also Bunce 2017).
The interview study at hand deals with these latter questions. Whereas most research
has focussed on the impact of audience metrics on journalists’ news selection practices,
we also look at how analytics, as they are becoming part of the newsroom infrastructure,
inform the broader editorial and strategic decision-making processes inside the news-
room. We want to investigate to what extent and how analytics have been integrated
within the organisational and professional context of newsrooms in Belgium, and how
this has led to new or altered work practices and processes both at the daily and more
strategic level. The study relies on interviews with digital news editors, which means
that the results reflect the uses and effects of analytics in news work as perceived by
the practitioners themselves. Below, we first discuss the theoretical background of our
study before specifying the research questions and presenting our empirical study.

Literature Review
Newsroom Innovation
As with all innovations in the newsroom, the adoption of audience analytics is both
shaping and being shaped by the organisational context in which they are implemented.
Literature on newsroom innovation shows that technology adoption is a process that is
socially negotiated through the practices and strategies of both newsroom managers
and staff. The integration of technology in the organisational context of the newsroom
depends on many factors, such as the level of newsroom leadership over the availability
and allocation of human and financial resources, or journalists’ professional attitudes
towards both the innovation and their audience (Boczkowski 2004; Paulussen 2016).
Hence, to understand the adoption of audience analytics in contemporary newsrooms,
it is relevant to take into account the organisational and professional factors that
enable and constrain the integration of these tools in the daily news work practices.
While audience analytics are a recent technological innovation, it is important not to
overstress their novelty and disregard the historical antecedents (Mitchelstein and Bocz-
kowski 2009). Although web analytics seem to have quickly become “normalised” as a
tool to monitor and incorporate audience feedback, media organisations have a fairly
360 K. LAMOT AND S. PAULUSSEN

long tradition in audience measuring (Anderson 2011; Napoli 2011). For decades, newspa-
pers have been gaining audience feedback from letters-to-the-editor or phone calls from
readers and later on from readership surveys or circulation figures, while broadcast media
carefully monitor their audience ratings. The emergence of web analytics can thus be
regarded as a next phase in a longer evolution from rather intuitive imaginations of the
audience to increased quantitative measurements of audience behaviours (Carlson
2018; Zamith 2018). In this sense, the implementation of web and social media analytics
may be considered by professionals as a rather “natural” technological extension of
tools and practices that have already been in place for a longer time. In other words,
we can expect that the embedding of web and social media analytics in the newsroom
has been, and still is, met with little resistance since the new tools fit well into the existing
routines, norms and work processes.
At the same time, it is relevant to note that newsroom managers also tend to use new
technologies as a means to push new strategies through in the organisation. Lee and
Tandoc (2017) point out, for instance, that newsroom managers use audience metrics
to evaluate their employees and move them in a favoured direction. Bunce (2017)
shows how audience analytics fit within a broader arsenal of techniques used by news-
room managers “to more efficiently monitor and discipline their journalists” and “to try
to change the reporting priorities of their journalists”. Thus, audience analytics are not
only used in newsrooms to monitor users’ engagement with online news stories, but
they can also serve as tools for managers to reduce journalists’ resistance towards
certain content strategies. By using audience metrics for performance evaluation, man-
agers can use these tools to discipline their team in accordance with the efficiency and
profit motives of the news organisation.

Measurable Journalism
Belair-Gagnon and Holton (2018) draw attention on the fact that the integration of audi-
ence analytics in newsrooms does not just depend on internal dynamics but is also
influenced by external pressures from web analytics companies. Having little experience
in journalism, these companies introduce and promote profit-making orientations in the
newsroom that challenge and influence the professional values and norms of news pro-
duction. Authors have been discussing the commodification of news and commercial
pressures on journalism for several decades (McManus 1994; McChesney 2004), but
more recently, scholars have expressed concerns about how audience analytics and
metrics may further accelerate and normalise these commercial orientations to the
news, in which the public-oriented editorial logic of journalism is being subdued by the
profit-oriented quantified and algorithmic logic of technology and media companies
(Poell and van Dijck 2014; Vu 2014). The quantification of audience behaviour does
indeed influence editorial decisions on the placement of news stories on the website,
leading to what Tandoc (2014) sees as a process of selection and “de-selection”. According
to Tandoc and Jenner (2016), web metrics are not only increasingly used to determine the
placement and packaging of news stories on the website, but also to inform editorial
decisions on the planning of future coverage on certain topics or stories. The latter is
confirmed by the study by Welbers et al. (2016) who found that audience clicks on news-
paper websites affect the news selection choices for the print edition.
 JOURNALISM PRACTICE 361

Furthermore, audience metrics may also lead journalists to mimic other media and copy
stories that do well on other platforms for publication on their own channels. As theorised
by Boczkowski (2010), the intensification of monitoring practices in news work, combined
with journalists’ inclination to imitate their competitors, may ultimately lead to increased
news homogenisation. Instead of using the knowledge gained from the constant
monitoring of content and audience behaviour to differentiate themselves from their
competitors, journalists tend to imitate each other by selecting the same popular
stories (Boczkowski and de Santos 2007). Hence, audience analytics may also lead to
more story imitation.
Despite concerns about the potential dumbing-down effects of audience analytics on
news selection, web analytics also create new opportunities for journalism. Both scholars
and practitioners are increasingly aware that audience analytics might help journalists to
restore their relationship with their audience (Zamith 2018). According to Hanusch (2017),
knowledge gained from analytics allows journalists to improve the multi-channel distri-
bution of news. He found that editors are generally positive about the ways in which ana-
lytics provide newsrooms with detailed real-time metrics that allow them to develop new
practices of “day- and platform-parting”, in which they can “target specific audiences
depending on the time of day they access news or the type of platform they use”
(Hanusch 2017, 1583). Practitioners believe that such data-informed practices may
narrow the “news gap” (Boczkowski and Mitchelstein 2013), i.e., the divergence
between what journalists consider newsworthy and what the audience deems noteworthy
(see also Lee and Chyi 2013). In order to better align their news supply to user demands,
news organisations need to improve their knowledge about their users’ behaviour and
audience engagement, and, in combination with new content and distribution strategies,
analytics might offer one way to achieve this goal.
Nevertheless, an international study by Cherubini and Nielsen (2016) suggests that
news organisations still have a lot to learn about audience engagement. The report
shows that web analytics are primarily used for short-term optimisation of the websites,
such as the placement and packaging of stories on the homepage or the planning of
follow-up stories for the online or print edition. Cherubini and Nielsen (2016) found less
examples in which web analytics are used to lay the foundations for longer term editorial
and organisational priorities like developing loyal and engaged audiences or more
effective journalism. As said above, the underlying optimistic belief is that audience ana-
lytics might help newsrooms to improve their knowledge about audience engagement
and public opinion formation. Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc (2018) found that this belief is
already present among online journalists, who are increasingly taking up audience-
oriented roles as they are encouraged by their superiors and peers to take into account
audience metrics in their editorial decisions. This leads them to develop new practices
in which quantitative and qualitative assessments of audience trends inform editorial
decisions “on how to better match journalistic content to what the audience wants and
expects” (Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc 2018, 449). Put differently, online journalists’ knowl-
edge and estimations of what the audience wants, expects and needs, seem to be increas-
ingly based on their interpretations (and misinterpretations) of audience metrics. Further
research is needed on the accuracy of such quantified measurements of audience engage-
ment and public interest. Yet, it can also be assumed that the knowledge gained from
audience analytics may have an influence on how journalists imagine or conceive their
362 K. LAMOT AND S. PAULUSSEN

audience, leading them to replace the “imagined audience” by a “quantified audience”

(Bunce 2015; Tandoc and Thomas 2015).
In sum, as noted by Carlson (2018, 413), current literature on “measurable journalism”
sketches two possible scenarios: The first scenario emphasises how analytics “elevate
economic imperatives above all else by enabling minute tinkering aimed at extracting
larger audience numbers”. In the other scenario, analytics are seen as an instrument for
journalists to augment their judgments, improve their selection choices and multi-
channel distribution strategies, and build better connections with their audience. Both
scenarios are not mutually exclusive, though. Rather do they highlight the tensions that
exist and have always existed between commercial and journalistic—and between quan-
tified and creative—audience orientations in the newsroom (Anderson 2011; Nelson and
Tandoc 2018). Therefore, instead of choosing sides, this study aims to investigate how
digital news editors try to navigate and regulate these tensions when using audience ana-
lytics in the newsroom.
By combining insights from literature on newsroom innovation on the one hand and
recent studies on measurable journalism on the other hand, we want to investigate the
adoption and uses of audience analytics and their perceived effects on the daily and stra-
tegic operations and decision-making inside the newsroom. The literature on newsroom
innovation reminds us that new tools are rarely used to their fullest potential but
shaped and confined by the social context of the newsroom. In other words, we
assume that analytics do not generate any direct or linear editorial effects since their
implementation in the newsroom is, like any other innovation, moderated by the routines,
norms and attitudes of those who use them (Boczkowski 2004). To better understand how
analytics blend and collide with current practices and norms, it is useful to look at the per-
ceptions of the practitioners on the adoption of and resistance to analytics in the news-
room. Having delineated different practices in our synthesis of the literature on
measurable journalism, the study further attempts to map and unravel the purposes for
which analytics are being used in newsrooms and digital news editors’ assessment of
these uses. Hence, this study proposes two research questions:
RQ1: What are the professional and organisational factors that influence the adoption and
acceptance of audience analytics within the newsroom?

RQ2: How do digital news editors’ assess the different purposes for which audience analytics
are used in the newsroom?

Method
On an empirical, descriptive level, this study is the first to map the adoption of audience
analytics in Belgian newsrooms. More fundamentally, however, the study tries to make a
contribution to current journalism scholarship by examining digital news editors’ percep-
tions and evaluations of the uses and effects of audience analytics within the newsroom.
Considering that the use of analytics is not only affecting, but also affected by the people
who use them, we opted for semi-structured, in-depth interviews with digital news editors.
Interviews enable to get a nuanced insight and understanding of the negotiation process
that guides the ways in which analytics become centralised and normalised in daily news
work.
 JOURNALISM PRACTICE 363

We conducted in-depth interviews with digital news editors. Aiming for diversity as well
as comparability in our sample, we interviewed editors of the 11 most-read online news
outlets in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. The ranking was based on
website traffic statistics of the Centre for Information on Media (CIM.be), consulted in
January 2018. The list included the websites of seven national newspapers, one news
magazine, one public and one commercial broadcaster, and one digital-born news
medium. With the exception of the latter stand-alone medium, which occupied position
11 in the ranking, and the public broadcaster’s website, all outlets belong to one of the
three largest and financially stable media groups in Flanders (Medialaan-De Persgroep
Publishing, Mediahuis and Roularta). However, despite the financial stability of the
groups to which they belong, digital news media in Flanders, like in the rest of world,
are under high commercial pressure due to the competition from platform companies,
declining advertising revenues, and the moderate success of paywalls (Evens and Van
Damme 2016). The online news outlets of the three legacy media groups have a freemium
business model, while the content of the digital-born medium and the public broadcas-
ter’s website is free of charge.
We interviewed the chief online editor of each news outlet. For 10 organisations, we
additionally interviewed one more person who held what Ferrer-Conill and Tandoc
(2018) call an “audience-oriented position”, such as “head of audience engagement”,
“social media manager”, “digital manager”, “chief social strategy” or “traffic specialist”.
These rather new newsroom positions are explicitly tasked to make sense of audience
metrics. Since our interviewees worked primarily for online news outlets and since the
use of web analytics is mainly associated with the news organisation’s website, the inter-
views mainly dealt with web analytics and online news decisions, but we also addressed
the use of social media and the influence of analytics on news selection choices in the print
or television outlet.
The 21 interviews were conducted between February and March 2018, using a semi-
structured, theory-guided topic list with a fixed set of questions we asked to each
editor. Journalists were first asked to describe their professional background and how a
regular workday looks like for them in order to contextualise their subsequent answers.
To what extent are they involved in editorial decision-making? How often do they
attend editorial meetings? During this first introductory part of the interview, we particu-
larly paid attention to hierarchies and job profiles in the newsroom to get a better under-
standing of how the current routines and organisational structures shape the adoption of
analytics (RQ1). Next, they were asked to reflect on their prevailing uses of audience
metrics and to assess the positive and negative ways in which metrics inform and affect
news work (RQ2). We used a semi-structured topic list to ensure that we asked each inter-
viewee about the use of analytics for the different purposes described in previous litera-
ture: story placement, story packaging and headline testing, story planning, and
performance assessment (both at the story level and for job evaluation). The interviewees
were asked to describe and evaluate whether and how they used analytics for these pur-
poses. In addition, we asked follow-up questions about other relevant uses of audience
analytics. Again, we showed particular interest in the editors’ perceptions and assessments
of these different uses and effects of analytics. The interviews took place face-to-face,
except for one interview that was conducted by telephone. The interviewees were guar-
anteed anonymity, considering the culturally charged nature of audience analytics and the
364 K. LAMOT AND S. PAULUSSEN

need for our participants to take an overt stance. All interviews were digitally recorded,
which added up to 806 min of recording time in total, with an average length of 38
min per interview.
We used the qualitative data analysis software package NVivo 11 to transcribe all inter-
views verbatim and to process our data. Finally, all transcripts were subjected to thematic
analysis, in which we searched for recurring themes within the data, using both codes that
were set a priori to look for particular aspects as well as new codes that emerged from the
data.

Findings
This section is organised around our two main research questions. For the first research
question, we focus on the organisational and professional factors that either foster or
restrict the adoption and acceptance of audience analytics as tools for journalism. The
second research question requires us to zoom in on the editors’ perceptions and assess-
ments of the purposes for which audience analytics can be used.

The Adoption of Analytics in the Newsroom

Each of the 11 newsrooms in our study uses analytical tools to monitor their audience.
Chartbeat and Google Analytics are the most popular ones, with Google Analytics being
used in every newsroom and with two newsrooms that do not use Chartbeat. One of
these two newsrooms developed a customised version of Chartbeat, while the other news-
room preferred a less expensive tool. To gather information from Facebook, Twitter and
the comment pages on their own website, Belgian digital news editors referred to Crowd-
tangle, Ezy Insights and Facebook Insights as the most used tools. However, some inter-
viewees said they individually used a wider array of web and social media analytical
tools such as Adobe Analytics, SmartOcto, IO, Spike, Hootsuite, CX Social and Echobox.
All interviewees, and especially those who hold audience-oriented newsroom positions,
were familiar with most of these tools, so we can safely say that audience analytics
have become part of the digital toolbox of online news editors in Belgian newsrooms.
This is of course already reflected in the fact that all newsrooms have one or more
staffers with an audience-oriented role. According to the interviewees, most of these
“social media editors” or “engagement managers” were hired in the previous one or
two years. In the larger media companies, in-house analytics expert teams—or “traffic
teams” as they were called—have been established to monitor the success of content
and audience behaviour on and across the different media channels and platforms. The
digital news editors said they closely worked together with the “traffic team”. To further
develop their data management skills and keep up with the rapid pace of change, inter-
viewees also said they participated in internal and external training sessions. Some of them
also organised in-house workshops to share their knowledge with their colleagues.
In line with literature on newsroom innovation, our interviews suggest that
organisational
structures are sometimes viewed as an obstacle to the optimal use of new technologies.
Some of our interviewees argued that physical and departmental boundaries within their
newsrooms are not beneficial for the creation of a “culture of data”. The traffic team is
 JOURNALISM PRACTICE 365

physically separated from the newsroom, which makes it difficult for them to gain a foot-
hold in the newsroom. One of our interviewees, who served as a bridge between the traffic
team and the newsroom stated that they were “quite jealous of our colleagues at [Dutch
newspaper owned by the same media company] where the traffic team works inside the news-
room.” The interviewee added that, as they had to work physically separated from the edi-
torial department, “it is harder for us to follow the newsroom dynamics, so we can only make
general recommendations.” However, in most newsrooms, online news chiefs and social
media editors have a seat at the “central news desk”, together with the other superiors
of the news organisation. One chief editor said: “I am sitting at a central desk. All superiors
sit there together and our social media manager sits there too. Actually, we are all involved in
the negotiations and decision-making in the newsroom.” This close cooperation enables the
transfer of a great deal of know-how on data between the different outlets through infor-
mal contacts. One social media manager described how his recommendations have
increasingly been taken on-board over the past few years: “I always work in consultation
with the homepage editors, but they have now such confidence in me that I often do not
have to justify my decisions anymore.”
Further, the interviewees tended to agree that a “data culture” could only arise if the
newsroom managers would be more transparent about the use of data and if data
were made accessible to individual journalists and editors, and not only to the traffic
team and the editor-in-chief (see also Cherubini and Nielsen 2016). In eight newsrooms,
real-time metrics are continuously visible on large TV screens, not only to inform all jour-
nalists about which stories are doing well, but also to stimulate the acceptance and nor-
malisation of analytics among the newsroom staff. In addition, the interviewees said they
often provided journalists with extra information and context for them to be able to make
the most out of these analytical tools. In most newsrooms, daily or weekly audience
metrics reports are sent around through e-mail. An editor explained: “One of our editors
makes a top 5 of the best performing articles on the site and Facebook each day, in compari-
son with the global traffic and the monthly average.” In two newsrooms, these e-mails were
sent to the entire staff. In most newsrooms, however, the reports are only circulated
among the online team and the editorial board or communicated to individual journalists
that worked on the article. Some interviewees said that editorial meetings tend to start
with a discussion of yesterday’s traffic figures.
The social media and engagement editors we interviewed, said that they monitored
audience metrics regularly, if not “constantly” or “maniacally”. However, a lack of time
kept them from studying the analytics in a more in-depth manner. The workload and con-
tinuous deadline of the online newsroom do not always allow them to do much beyond
their daily tasks, as a site manager recognised: “I simply don’t have the time to follow these
things to the letter.” Other interviewees argued that more knowledge can be gained from
analytics, but this requires more resources. One interviewee said that his newsroom was
now unable to systematically use Chartbeat’s headline-testing feature because of a lack
of time and resources. Another interviewee said they only appoint a journalist to be
responsible for the social media channels when nobody has taken a leave of absence or
has fallen ill.
When asked editors how they perceived the attitudes of journalists towards the use of
web analytics inside the newsroom, interviewees agreed that there is a degree of healthy
scepticism among journalists, but in general, resistance towards audience analytics is
366 K. LAMOT AND S. PAULUSSEN

perceived to be rather low. Interviewees indicated that most journalists are curious and
interested in audience data, although some noticed a difference between the print and
online journalists. The latter seem to be more eager to learn and see how their own articles
are performing online. One interviewee asserted that “some journalists even think that they
are not doing a good job when their articles no longer appear in the top 10 for a few days.”
However, interviewees were also aware that an ever-more competitive battle for attention
could lead reporters to focus on tangential stories that get a lot of hits. Audience analytics
do foster internal competition. For example, a chief editor explained how he had to redir-
ect incentives because journalists became reluctant to publish their stories behind the
paywall as such stories never appear in the most-viewed list. Another digital news
manager put it as follows:
Journalists know that numbers depend on how an article is played out on the website’s home-
page or on social media. Some of them would therefore go and lobby the online team to high-
light their own articles. So it creates a hunger for visibility, public and success. … To a certain
degree we also want that, … but we try to avoid evaluating our journalists only on that basis.
You need to do it in moderation.

The Uses of Audience Analytics

For our second research question, we are interested in the purposes for which analytics are
utilised and how analytics have an influence on the work practices and organisational
strategies that determine the news decision-making process. Based on the literature, we
distinguished different uses of audience analytics in the newsroom: audience analytics
inform decisions about placement (Lee, Lewis, and Powers 2012), story packaging, story
planning, and performance evaluation (Tandoc and Jenner 2016; Lee and Tandoc 2017).
Further, we discussed with interviewees to what extent audience analytics result in
“story imitation” (selecting stories that do well on other websites or platforms; cf. Bocz-
kowski 2010) and “audience conception” (the construction of the “imagined audience”
on the basis of metrics, cf. Coddington 2018). Below, we discuss how editors perceive
the possibilities and limitations of audience analytics for each of these six functions.

Story Placement
Whereas Google Analytics is used for more general evaluations and comparisons on a
longer-term basis (e.g., one week or month), Chartbeat is primarily used for real-time
observational data about their readers and the intra-day management of their home-
pages. Web analytics inform editorial decisions on the placement of stories on the
website (Lee, Lewis, and Powers 2012). Since the website’s homepage can only feature
a limited number of stories, editors need to determine which stories to prioritise. Intervie-
wees considered it obvious to “take a look at Chartbeat figures” when taking these editorial
decisions. One editor stated that it was just a matter of good practice: “if you have a dozen
articles, it makes sense to give the most-read article a better position than those that are not
read at all.” Another editor nuanced that “it is not that we only look at Chartbeat, but if we
see that an article does not give any return, it will not harm if we put it on a lower position.”
Interviewees stressed that Chartbeat’s recommendations are always balanced with edi-
torial judgements about a story’s newsworthiness. They all firmly disagreed with the
idea that audience metrics would skew these judgements. One editor gave the example
 JOURNALISM PRACTICE 367

of Brexit coverage, which hardly, if ever, succeeds in arousing great audience engagement,
but as it is deemed an important and relevant topic, they keep featuring these articles on
top of the page. There was a general consensus among interviewees that, as one of them
put it, “you must of course respect journalistic values, so we will never put the important pieces
at the bottom of our site just because they are not sexy enough to click on.” That said, the
interviewees also stressed the importance of a well thought-out “homepage composition”,
and Chartbeat figures help them to create what some called a “good news mix”.

Story Packaging
A second way in which audience analytics are used for, is story packaging. Tandoc and
Jenner (2016, 431) define story packaging as all adaptations journalists make to an
article after it has already been mostly constructed. This includes decisions about the pres-
entation of stories or their promotion on social media platforms. With the exception of the
public service broadcaster, all media organisations systematically use the A/B-headline
testing services of Chartbeat or similar tools like Google Optimize or Echobox. With head-
line testing, the web editor writes an A-headline and a B-headline, and the software will
expose half of the readers randomly to the A-headline, while the other half is shown
the B-headline to estimate which headline generates the most clicks. One editor said
that “in nine out of ten cases, we will pick the one with the highest rating. Unless we think
it is formulated too bluntly or too ‘clickbaity’.” When discussing “clickbait” more in-depth,
all editors seemed rather vexed. They argued that a journalist can make an article more
accessible for the public by writing an attractive or teasing headline, but they would
never consider that as “clickbait”, a term they associate with misleading and deceitful
headlines that do not match the story’s content. For the interviewees, the demarcation
line between clickbait and engaging headlines was very clear and evident. Confronted
with the question of whether his readers would agree with him, one interviewee explained
that “if we write a headline that is not consistent with the content of the article, we know our
readers won’t click next time. It would be stupid to fool our readers.” Other interviewees made
the analogy with newspaper headlines, arguing that it is a general rule in journalism that
“an article with a bad headline will not be read”.

Story Planning
Previous research suggests that audience analytics are also used by editors to make
decisions on which stories or topics to report about in the near future. For instance, if ana-
lytics show that a certain story is doing well, editors may plan follow-up stories or they may
decide to assign additional coverage for the next day’s print edition (Tandoc and Jenner
2016, 431–432). The digital news editors in our study confirmed that audience metrics are
taken into account for story planning. One editor gave an example of how audience
metrics had even led them to hire specialist reporters for the science news beat
because the scientific news stories performed surprisingly well on the website: “If a
science editor wants to write a new piece nowadays, I will tell him: ‘don’t hold back, write
a lot about it!’” Another interviewee said that his newsroom secured more time and
resources for “regional judiciary”, because it often appeared in the top five topics in
Google Analytics: “Whilst our court reporters could previously write 10 line stories, we are
now letting them write 30–40 lines.” Editors thus admitted that they felt encouraged to
368 K. LAMOT AND S. PAULUSSEN

invest more in certain topics that generate a lot of audience feedback. Sometimes audi-
ence metrics correct their “gut feeling”, as one interviewee explained:
I never would have guessed it, but everything we publish on royalty scores incredibly well. We
happen to have a journalist who is specialised in royalty, but in the past, she was never allowed
to focus only on that subject. Now, she has her own royalty news blog on Sunday.

In line with the study by Hanusch (2017), the interviews also indicate that story planning
takes place throughout the news day and across different platforms. In other words, web
analytics do not only influence editors’ decisions about the online news, but they also
inform the decision-making process about the print edition and other channels of the
media organisation. One editor working for a broadcaster said that also their TV news
editor sometimes looks at the web metrics to decide on the composition of the news
broadcast: “Recently, something he had planned to be the third item became the opening
piece of the broadcast, because he saw how much attention it gained online.” Another
editor gave an example of a small topic that exploded on Facebook in the course of the
day, which urged him to assign a print reporter to the story. Interviewees said that
these practices of multi-channel story planning become more and more commonplace
in the newsroom.

Story Imitation
As mentioned above, larger media organisations work with “traffic teams” that monitor
stories and audience engagement in different outlets on different platforms. Half of the
newsrooms in our study used social media analytics tools such as Crowdtangle and Ezy
Insights to monitor the engagement and scope of their own articles on social media as
well as those of their nearest competitors. If a certain story is performing well on a com-
petitor’s website, editors may be likely to pick them up for publication on their own media
channels. This leads to story imitation and content homogenisation, but most of our inter-
viewees did not consider it as a problem. Again, this routine was rather seen as a matter of
good practice, as one interviewed stated: “If we suddenly see that an article is performing
particularly well on the website of [name of competitor], we will obviously pick it up, and
vice versa.”
While interviewees recognised the commercial logic behind such selection practices,
most of them were not concerned about potential dumbing-down effects. Instead, they
were strongly convinced that when analytics are used wisely as a “tool” or “compass”,
and “complementary” to journalistic gut feeling, they could help to do better and more
useful journalism. As one editor put it:
Most media organisations are commercial enterprises, so in a way it is logical that we use these
tools. Nevertheless, you always need to preserve your journalistic values and ethics. Otherwise
you are not practicing journalism anymore, but plain commerce.

Performance Evaluation
In line with Lee and Tandoc (2017) and Bunce (2017), our interviews indicate that audience
analytics are also used, to some degree, as tools to evaluate and discipline employees. In
Belgian newsrooms, journalists regularly receive feedback based on web metrics. Besides
individual feedback on particular stories, reports are also circulated to highlight “good
 JOURNALISM PRACTICE 369

practices” of the kind of stories and topics that performed well. A chief editor explained
that they “do not intend to organise a competition, but we want to create some kind of
awareness among journalists, like, you know, ‘these tools really tell you something’.”
Further, web analytics also help to socialise journalists into the “digital-first” culture that
newsrooms try to foster. Interviewees acknowledged that especially among print journal-
ists, web analytics are still met with a great deal of distrust or indifference, a finding in line
with a recent study by Nelson and Tandoc (2018). However, most interviewees argued that
this scepticism was rather due to a lack of knowledge about how these tools can be
employed in favour of creating more engaging journalism. To increase knowledge and
openness about metrics among their employees, one interviewee said that “at my previous
job, we had a ‘Chartbeat trophy’—I’m not sure it still exists. Every time one of the newspaper
journalists published an online article that went through the roof, I would hand him or her the
trophy.”
While journalists are thus actively encouraged to learn from metrics, none of the news-
rooms used audience analytics to systematically measure their employees’ job perform-
ance. Only at the digital-born medium, an interviewee told us that analytics are also
monitored and compared on an individual level. She stated that for job evaluations,
they “take two things into consideration: how many articles someone has produced and
how many views he has. If there is someone who keeps dangling at the bottom month
after month, we will indeed draw some conclusions from that.”

Audience Conception
Finally, the interviews show that audience analytics have an influence on journalists’ per-
ceptions of what their public thinks. Their “imagined audience” becomes increasingly con-
structed on the basis of metrics. In general, web analytics seem to be regarded by our
interviewees as valid measures of the audience’s interests, sentiments and opinions.
None of them questioned the algorithms on which these metrics are based. Instead,
they argued that metrics helped them gain a clearer picture of their users on the basis
of accurate, objective information. An often-heard argument is that, as one interviewee
put it:
Back in the days, we had to sail blind. We made a newspaper by the seat of our pants, just
assuming it would all be read. But now we sometimes have to admit: ‘Sorry guys, it’s not
working’. I’m glad that we know our readers better now.

Digital news editors also said they felt more confident about the topics that their readers
are interested in or concerned about. As such, audience metrics also serve as an indication
of the interests and opinions among their readership. One of the interviewees stated that
Google Analytics gives him a more reliable reflection of the audience’s interests and
opinions than social media, since the first actually tracks audience behaviour and engage-
ment, while the latter mainly comprise self-expressed opinions of only a minority of people
who want to speak out publicly.
Yet, there is a general consensus that progress still has to be made in the ways they
interpret metrics as measures of public interest and opinion. Some interviewees believed
they were moving in the right direction as their attention was shifting away from the mere
clicks and page views to more advanced measures such as attention time, level of content
recirculation and user loyalty. Moreover, they stated that web and social media analytics
370 K. LAMOT AND S. PAULUSSEN

always need to be combined with conventional forms of audience research and matched
to the editorial norms, values and judgements. That way, audience analytics can become
further integrated and normalised within the work practices inside the newsroom, or as
one editor concluded: “The media have always used audience measurements; web analytics
do exactly the same thing, just more elaborated.”

Conclusion
The goal of this study was twofold. Firstly, we wanted to know to what extent Belgian
digital newsrooms have integrated audience analytics into their daily operations. In line
with international research, we can conclude that a large degree of normalisation has
been realised with regard to the adoption of these new tools for audience measurement.
All newsrooms in our study have invested in hiring new job profiles like “social media man-
agers” or “engagement editors” to systematically monitor and make sense of traffic and
audience behaviour data on the range of platforms that media organisations use for
news distribution. Further, they all make efforts to facilitate the exchange of the knowl-
edge of analytics among their journalists, both in the print and online teams, in order
to build a “culture of data” (Cherubini and Nielsen 2016, 14), wherein every journalist is
open to act on the insights gained from analytics. The interviews show that audience ana-
lytics are gradually becoming integrated and routinised within the daily work practices
and organisational strategies of today’s newsrooms. Editors consider it logical and
obvious to use analytics as yardstick for making editorial decisions.
Secondly, we focused on the daily operational and strategic uses of analytics in the
newsroom. Based on previous research, we distinguished six purposes for which digital
news editors turn to audience analytics: story placement, story packaging, story planning,
story imitation, performance evaluation, and audience conception. Our interviews show
that Belgian digital news editors use analytics for each of these six purposes, although
the findings are nuanced. Interviewees stressed that metrics are taken into consideration
in deciding where to place or how to package a story on the website, but these algorithmic
recommendations are always balanced against their own editorial judgments. They
strongly rejected the idea that analytics would lead them to produce more clickbait or
to favour the popular over the relevant news stories. With regard to story planning and
story imitation, editors also seemed to suggest that analytics do not change the ways in
which newsrooms have been working for decades, in the sense that editorial decision-
making processes have always been informed by what competitors are doing and by
what has already proven to appeal to the audience’s attention. A newer practice is that
audience analytics also allow newsroom managers to evaluate employees’ job perform-
ance on the basis of how much attention and engagement they generate with their
stories, but, with the exception of the digital-born news medium, the interviews
suggest that analytics are not used for performance evaluation on an individual level.
However, on a more aggregate level, daily or weekly web metrics reports and soft
rewards for well-performing staffers allow newsroom managers to discipline and socialise
their journalists within a more data-driven newsroom culture. Finally, our interviews
suggest that web analytics also serve as a proxy or indication of public opinion. Digital
news editors feel that the use of analytics has improved their knowledge about how to
connect with the audience’s interests and concerns.
 JOURNALISM PRACTICE 371

In conclusion, we can say that there is a general consensus among digital news editors
that analytics support rather than harm their journalism. While scholars have expressed
their concern about potential misuses or dumbing-down effects of analytics, the journal-
ists in our study tend to minimise these risks, suggesting that newsrooms have always
been expected to find a balance between their medium’s commercial and editorial inter-
ests. However, the finding that editors are mostly positive about the uses of analytics in the
newsroom does not mean that they are right. Interviews reflect the editors’ perceptions,
but do not allow us to say anything about the effects of analytics on the type of news
stories that are published and highlighted in the media outlets, which is the focus of
many concerns about the datafication of journalism. Further research should look into
how current editorial and strategic uses of analytics in news work affect journalists’ selec-
tion and storytelling practices. More specifically, we believe that content analyses and
experiments can help researchers to better understand the short- and longer-term
effects of the six uses of analytics on the news output.

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.

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

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