Towards Better Uses of News Engagement Analytics in Nordic Newsrooms

I am presenting our research on the in the Australian Facebook news ban in the post-lunch session at ECREA 2024 this Friday, but we start with a paper by Visa Noronen which examines news organisations’ attempts to understand their audiences in the current media context. This is important for determining editorial direction, and the present study examines such processes for the Nordic countries.

There has been a significant shift towards online news media use in these countries, and audiences are even often prepared to pay for online news subscriptions. Visa interviewed some 16 staff from news organisations that are not market leaders in their respective countries, and which are therefore much harder hit by news market changes. Their editorial decisions are arguably even more important for the long-term survival of these news organisations, therefore.

How have these newsrooms developed their use of audience analytics and metrics, then? How do media strategies and journalistic imperatives intersect here? Past research on market leaders in Anglo markets has shown three levels of rudimentary analytics (some data and tools, poorly understood), generic analytics (multiple standard tools, short-term optimisation of audience engagement), and editorial analytics uses (tailor-made tools, short-term optimisation and long-term planning).

The adoption of such approaches also means making strategic changes in management and shifting journalistic identities. This might involve setting key performance indicators, which is a common practice in business but conflicts with journalists’ identities; setting appropriate and meaningful KPIs can be difficult, and must be allowed to run its course over a longer period of time.

It may also involve personalisation, which is especially difficult for legacy media outlets that previously produced a single product for their mass audiences; now, media can (but do not always do) target specific niche audiences with the content that they produce, and this may also lead to an increase in reader subscriptions.

This might then point to a need to introduce a fourth category of newsroom analytics: beyond editorial (mass) analytics, and towards editorial niche analytics.