The Traffic Factories: Metrics at Chartbeat, Gawker Media, and The New York Times

In a 2010 New Yorker profile, founder and CEO of Gawker Media Nick Denton argued, “probably the biggest change in Internet media isn’t the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability.” 1 What does all this data mean for the production of news? In the earlier days of web analytics, editorial metrics had both enthusiastic proponents and impassioned detractors. Nowadays the prevailing view is that metrics aren’t, by definition, good or bad for journalism. Rather, the thinking goes, it all depends what is measured: Some metrics, like page views, incentivize the production of celebrity slide shows and other vapid content, while others, like time on a page, reward high-quality journalism. Still, there are some who doubt that even so-called “engagement metrics” can peacefully coexist with (let alone bolster) journalistic values. This report’s premise is that it will be impossible to settle these debates until we understand how people and organizations are producing, interpreting, and using metrics. I conducted an ethnographic study of the role of metrics in contemporary news by examining three case studies: Chartbeat, Gawker Media, and The New York Times. Through a combination of observation and interviews with product managers, data scientists, reporters, bloggers, editors, and others, my intention was to unearth the assumptions and values that underlie audience measures, the effect of metrics on journalists’ daily work, and the ways in which metrics interact with organizational culture

Making Peace with Metrics: Relational Work in Online News Production

How do workers make peace with performance metrics that threaten their professional values? Drawing on Viviana Zelizer’s concepts of relational work and “good matches,” we focus on the case of online news production and analyze efforts to align audience metrics with journalistic values. Whereas existing research on web metrics tends to frame editorial production and audience data as “hostile worlds” of professional and market forces that cannot be reconciled, we show that journalists rely on relational work to make metrics acceptable within organizations. Drawing on ethnographic material, we identify five key relational strategies: moral boundary-drawing between "good" and "bad" metrics, strategic invocation of "best-case scenarios," domestication through bespoke metrics, reframing metrics as democratic feedback, and justifying metrics as organizational subsidies. We then turn to cases of failure and document a process that we call overspelling, which can coincide with organizational breakdown. We conclude by discussing the concept of “failed matches” and the indirect relationship between metrics and markets in online news production

ONE OF THESE THINGS_IS_LIKE THE OTHERS: WHAT BIG TECH PLATFORMS CAN LEARN FROM LIBRARIES, BOOKSTORES, AND SUPERMARKETS

Large technology platforms are facing mounting public pressure to be more transparent and proactive about their approach to content moderation. Existing research on platform governance often focuses on the ways in which the platforms are unprecedented (e.g., their size, scale, and use of algorithmic systems to sort and filter information), and thus contend with unique challenges as they attempt to manage their outsize role in shaping the contemporary public sphere. However, their distinctive features notwithstanding, platforms are currently grappling with questions that have long been fundamental to democracies with heavily marketized media systems. How can information intermediaries best operate in the public interest? Can for-profit platforms reconcile their private interests with the public good? Through what kinds of organizational infrastructures and shared value systems might this reconciliation be accomplished? Using a comparative case study approach, this paper addresses these questions by examining institutions that have historically inhabited a structural position in the public information landscape that is similar to large technology platforms. Specifically, we look at how bookstores, libraries, and supermarkets decide what to stock on their shelves and magazine racks, and how they respond when controversies arise. The study maps several considerations each of these intermediaries have faced in order to develop a typology of approaches to information curation and moderation. By examining a variety of oft-overlooked approaches to information curation and outlining their respective benefits and drawbacks, we hope to contribute a historical and conceptual perspective to scholarly and industry conversations about platform governance