Abstract
Much scholarly attention of late has been devoted to the topic of audience metrics in digital news, and for good reason. News industries have always had their rough measurements, from circulation numbers to Nielsen ratings to aggregate online traffic numbers. Ups and downs in these numbers beget guesswork about what was causing the fluctuations, with these untestable theories driving very real decisions about newsworthiness and editorial strategy. The granularity of digital metrics opens up what in an earlier era would have been literally incredible data: the splintering of mass traffic into its basic components, in real time, involving real users. Scholars have rushed to study how this technology is affecting news production, finding a mix of excitement and resentment, careful attention and willful ignorance, and the establishment of news engagement-minded positions or the hording of data by managers. In Metrics at Work, Christin, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, provides much needed depth with her nuanced look at two newsrooms, one based in New York and the other in Paris. She uses her access to these two newsrooms to capture the hopes and fears of native digital news outlets and to understand how metrics figure in this equation.
The title of this book, Metrics at Work, belies its ambition and scope, which is really to chart the development of native digital news over the past quarter century in the U.S. and French contexts. This is quite a useful endeavor, given that in the scramble for nouns we decided on the unfortunate descriptor of “new media” for all things digital. The U.S.-based site that Christin studies began operating in the mid-1990s, so characterizing it as “new media” in 2020 would be like calling television new media during the Watergate hearings. Too often scholars of digital journalism fall into an atemporality that takes the moment of the research as indicative of a whole paradigm of news instead of as a snapshot of a speeding train that, by now, has covered quite a bit of track. Metrics at Work takes the long view, capturing a life cycle that began in the halcyon days of the original dot com boom in the late 1990s, when digital native news sites benefited from heaps of optimism from investors or became experimental playgrounds for legacy news corporations. The losses these sites incurred were rounding errors to these media behemoths, and they functioned better as futuristic tokens than as self-sufficient revenue generators. Once the initial fanfare faded, these sites were doused with the cold water of economic reality as they confronted advertising rates that would never rise above paltry sums and paywalls that would never generate enough paying members to keep the lights on. News sites asked to fend for themselves in the cruel world of digital news economics found themselves locked in, perhaps inevitably, to the grand hunt for clicks—a business model unceasing in its appetite and uncaring in its shallowness. Journalistic labor became precarious and future funding uncertain. More recently, digital news has sought a way forward away from the race for clicks by seeking engagement and loyalty more than pure aggregate numbers. At the end of the book, we learn that one of the sites has, for now, found stability in this environment through a diverse portfolio that includes podcasting and membership plans while the other site has all-but-vanished after being relegated to a vertical within the website of a larger media organization.
Metrics play a role in this drama, but as Christin points out, it is not a determinative role as much a utilitarian one once the click-based model had taken hold. At a certain point, both organizations confronted the gap between their ambitions and their economic reality by upping the amount of content they publish, honing story placement to drive more traffic, and hoping for the best. There is a lot of familiarity between the U.S. and French sites, but some important distinctions arise. At the U.S.-based outlet, management closely watched the clicks while journalists pushed them to the rear. Conversely, at the French outlet, the management dismissed clicks as too cold a measure of newsworthiness, but the journalists kept close watch on them. Such differences lend evidence to Christin’s claims that metrics are “contested symbolic objects” whose meanings have power only in particular contexts.
The strengths of this book lie in its careful observations as Christin captures the struggles and concerns of digital journalists trying to make it. Typical of ethnographic work, the book is chock full of voice and anecdotes that provide a sense of what working in these newsrooms is like. But there is also some question of whether news has evolved even more in the 5 or 6 years since the fieldwork was conducted. Also, the theoretical ground here is much less developed, with a smattering of sociological mainstays like Foucault, Bourdieu, and Weber, along with a bit of new institutionalism, to make sense of the findings. Yet, ultimately, the book provides a three-dimensional portrait of how audience metrics are an ever-present marker of the inhospitable environment these journalists face as they seek to realize the type of digital news to which they have devoted their careers.
