Common Patterns in the Metrification of Journalism in Australia

The post-lunch session at the Future of Journalism 2023 conference that I’m attending is on platforms, and begins with Sherine Conyers. Her focus is on newsroom metrics, and she conducted an ethnography of networked digital newsrooms in Australia with a particular focus on their metrics tools. Her focus here is on two case studies which illuminate platformisation at work .

The first case study is of a slow news day at a news organisation, with the Chartbeat Big Board news engagement metrics moving slowly and editors on the lookout for new stories. Meanwhile, searches related to Jennifer Aniston are trending on Google, and reluctantly a journalist is assigned and even more reluctantly writes a brief story about whatever is happening here. This moves straight up the Chartbeat Big Board and becomes the news outlet’s story of the day. Sherine calls this an act of metric confirmation: the content is derived from existing metrics, and its subsequent performance confirms those metrics; this happens especially on slow news days.

The second case relates to a long-term investigative research story produced by a major network, prepared for cross-promotion via TV broadcast and the digital news site. After the main TV broadcast a full digital story was to be published online. But this became a major national story, with rival networks and outlets also diverting substantial resources to covering it and eventually outranking the original network. It was only by mid-morning that the original content team produced the additional content to regain the lead in the content race. The team saw this as a failure – there was not enough content derived from journalistic discovery that was ready to go, partly because investing so much effort into a story with as yet unknown potential was seen as risky beforehand.

Both case studies reveal that metrics tend to obfuscate other quality markers of news value; journalistic behaviours and processes were geared towards platforms, and metric pressure was especially strong on slow news days. This is driven by the desire to avoid investing substantial resources in stories that would not produce major metric wins. There is a silent metric performance pressure sitting at the background of all of this: ratings agencies constantly rank news outlets by the digital metrics they achieve.

Journalists focussing on metrics are merely helping to optimise platforms, therefore; algorithms optimise attention for platforms, and feed on the news that attracts attention rather than on news that is objectively valuable. And this is not a problem limited to Australia: the replication of these patterns is critical to the democratic value of news everywhere. Australia is a special case here, however, because voting is compulsory, and the metrification of the news can lead to an overemphasis on particular news stories and a loss of broader, more balanced coverage. Metrics dependence also leads to news market capture by platforms: a de-localisation of information and a growing dependence on platform for publication, dissemination, and engagement. Metrics obfuscate news values, and digital measures are aligned wth platform logics but not necessarily with the needs of societies.