The Politics of Data series continues with an investigation of how data-driven performance measurements operate in the workplace. What can we learn from the case of clicks in online news? Drawing from her ethnographic research shadowing web journalists, Angèle Christin illuminates the ambiguous and rather vague sets of meanings associated with clicks and web metrics that have become so omnipresent in online journalism

Christin, Angèle

LSE Research Online

10/9/2015Web analytics in the workplace: What Amazon and webnewsrooms have in common – and where they differ.blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/10/09/what-amazon-and-web-newsrooms-have-in-common-and-where-they-differ/The Politics of Data series continues with an investigation of how data-driven performancemeasurements operate in the workplace. What can we learn from the case of clicks in online news?Drawing from her ethnographic research shadowing web journalists, AngèleChristin illuminates the ambiguous and rather vague sets of meanings associated with clicks andweb metrics that have become so omnipresent in online journalism.On August 15, 2015, The New York Times published a front-page story by Jodi Kantor and DavidStreitfeld entitled “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace.” The articleexamined the “data-driven” culture of Amazon, the constant competition between managers to get the highestscores, and the “purposeful darwinism” and elimination of the weakest employees that, according to the journalists,make Amazon a “bruising” workplace.The article was an instant hit. It remained on top of the “most viewed” and “most emailed” lists for days. As ofSeptember 1, 2015, it had attracted more than 5,800 comments, the highest number ever received by an articlepublished on The New York Times website. It was the subject of much commentary on Twitter, Reddit, and otheronline platforms.While many readers concurred with the reporting featured in the article and explained in their comments that theywere immediately going to cancel their subscription to Amazon Prime, others disagreed. Nick Ciubotariu, a managerat Amazon, published a post on LinkedIn – viewed more 1.2 million times – in which he criticized The New YorkTimes article for being “blatantly incorrect” and based on anecdotal and misleading evidence: “I actually work here,and can give you a data-driven perspective of what life at Amazon is really like, today. I’m not an anonymous source,and I’m not something a journalist made up to generate clicks.” In an internal memo to all Amazon employees, JeffBezos recommended reading Ciubotariu’s piece in conjunction with The New York Times article. A heateddiscussion ensued, at The New York Times and elsewhere, about whether the journalists’ reporting was biased.This debate struck me as particularly salient given my own research on metrics and performance measurements inonline journalism. The New York Times criticized Amazon’s data-driven culture during a moment when mostnewsrooms are themselves becoming increasingly data-driven. As others commentators and I have writtenelsewhere, the popularity of online articles (clicks, unique visitors, likes, tweets, etc.) has become an importantyardstick of performance and value in most web newsrooms (though The New York Times appears to remain anexception to the rise of metrics). Perhaps not surprisingly, a news story challenging data-driven workplaces faredextremely well in terms of clicks, the favored performance metric of online journalism.This piece gives a brief analysis of how and why clicks have become such a central actor in web newsrooms beforeconcluding with reflections on broader questions about workplace surveillance, performance measurements, andthe similarities and differences between Amazon and web newsrooms.Traffic, traffic, trafficOver the past two decades, journalism has changed dramatically. Whereas the circulation and advertising revenuesof printed newspapers continue to decline, the number of online readers, online advertising revenues, and newswebsites has increased exponentially, along with other forms of web publications such as blogs and social mediasites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).1/4Yet there is still no clear business model for the journalism of the future. A handful of prestigious publications withwell-known brand names created “paywalls,” or online subscription systems, to require payment from their readers:this is the case of The New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Most other news sites(including publications such as The Guardian, or The Huffington Post) still rely exclusively on advertising revenue,which is based on the number of monthly readers coming to the website. In other words, web traffic has become acentral locus of attention for web editors struggling to maintain their advertising revenues in an extremely competitiveenvironment.Image credit: Amazon España (CC BY) and The New York Times newsroom (Public Domain)As a consequence, a rapidly growing market has emerged for “web analytics,” that is, software programs crunchingmassive amounts of server data about online traffic. Google Analytics, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Visual Revenue, SocialFlow, and many others programs now track the number of “clicks,” “unique visitors,” “likes,” “shares,” “tweets,” “timeengaged,” and “virality” of every bit of content published online. Most of these programs provide information in realtime, actualizing results every couple of seconds. Analytics software programs have become central actors in webnewsrooms. Based on this data, web editors and journalists know which articles are “flops” and which pieces are“doing well” shortly after each article is posted.I spent several years “shadowing” web journalists and web editors in Paris and New York throughout their dailyactivities, listening to their comments about traffic, following their exchanges on Twitter, and then interviewing themrepeatedly to find out about their careers and their interests. I also analyzed emails and archival material about thecreation and development of online organizations in the United States and France and made a statistical analysis ofthe determinants of online success of different kinds of articles.Based on this ethnographic research, I found that web metrics play a paradoxical role in most web newsrooms.Specifically, web metrics take at least three distinct sets of meanings depending on the context and the people whoare using them.Clicks between advertising revenues and the public sphereFirst, for online news organizations, web analytics are seen as “objective” tools providing detailed information aboutthe audience. How long do the readers stay on each page? How many readers access articles from social media2/4sites such as Facebook and Twitter? How often do they “share” and “tweet” about articles on social networks?Whereas marketing department use this information in order to sell and negotiate the price of banners ads on thewebsite, editors try to tweak the production of online content in order to maximize traffic. They hope to identify“niches” in their audiences, or specific groups of readers who care about a given topic and need to be catered to ona regular basis. They also rely on real-time analytics as a tool to decide which stories to “promote” or “downgrade”on the homepage based on how well they are doing. According to editors, the use of web analytics helps rationalizethe relationship to the audience, at a time when traffic maximization has become an imperative in online news.Second, web analytics are used by some editors as performance indicators for managing their personnel, especiallywhen deciding how to promote and compensate journalists. Most analytics programs provide summary informationabout each author: how productive is the writer? How many visitors do his or her articles attract on average? Howpopular are her articles on social media? Web editors acknowledge taking into account this information whendeciding which writers to hire or promote. High traffic numbers do not necessarily mean that a given journalist istalented, but, according to editors, talented journalists tend to have high traffic numbers, which then improve theircareer prospects. At several sites in New York and Paris, this correlation between revenue and traffic is even moreclear: writers are “paid by the click,” as a percentage of the advertising revenues that their articles attract. Theymight also receive substantial bonuses when their articles are highly shared on social media, or when their piecesfeature videos viewed by a high number of readers.Third, web analytics are an ambivalent signal of reputation and popularity for web journalists. Journalists are wellaware that “sex, scandals, and celebrities” are highly popular online and often make cynical comments on thepreferences of online readers. Yet the same journalists also acknowledge that they tend to experience strongemotions, positive and negative, when their articles “go viral,” or conversely when their pieces are “flops.”Journalists explain that they write their articles with the hope that they will reach a large audience. When such anambition fails, they feel discouraged. Clicks are more than a simple reflection of market pressures. For webjournalists, online success can also be a signal of fame and involvement in the public sphere.Algorithmic quantification turned against itselfGoing back to the broader question of performance measurements, workplace surveillance, and power relations intech companies, what can we learn from the case of clicks in online news? I conclude with two ideas.First, we need to understand that it is because of the ambiguous and rather vague sets of meanings associated withclicks that web metrics have become so omnipresent in online journalism: everybody can project his or her owninterests on them. A similar point can be made about Amazon, where white- and blue-collar workers alike tend toproject many different types of meanings unto the metrics used to evaluate them.Second, an intriguing Foucauldian pattern of contagious discipline emerges: although web metrics were originallydesigned to measure the behavior of others (here the audience), these numbers end up being used as ameasurement of the journalists’ own professional performance. In other words, in the case of journalism, thealgorithmic quantification of others was turned against the journalists themselves. Once again, a similar argumentcould be made about Amazon, which first began by measuring the behavior of its customers in great detail beforeapplying the same regime to its employees.Yet the similarities between Amazon and web newsrooms end there. What “performance” means in retail companiesis fairly easy to measure, whether in terms of new clients, more items shipped, or more efficient websites. For mosteditors and journalists, the most significant – and least disputable – ways to assess success are not quantitativemeasurements, but the receipt of a Pulitzer Prize. The continued existence of a non-quantifiable measure of successremains a crucial difference between journalists on deadline and harassed tech company managers.This is part of a wider series on the Politics of Data. For more on this topic, also see Mark Carrigan’sPhilosophy of Data Science interview series and the Discover Society special issue on the Politics of Data3/4(Science).Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Impact of Social Science blog, nor of theLondon School of Economics. Please review our Comments Policy if you have any concerns on posting a commentbelow.About the AuthorAngèle Christin is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Data & Society Institute, the Fondation de la Maison des Sciencesde l’Homme, and The New School for Social Research. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Princeton Universityand the EHESS (Paris) in July 2014.Copyright © The Author (or The Authors) - Unless otherwise stated, this work is licensed under a CreativeCommons Attribution Unported 3.0 License.4/4

Web analytics in the workplace: What Amazon and web newsrooms have in common – and where they differ.

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