The future of digital storytelling is intrinsically tied to the use of audience data, and that’s leading to fragmentation of the audience.
I’ve been studying the use of metrics and analytics for years, but my recent conversations with journalists were part of a broader study called the Journalistic Role Performance (JRP) project. In cooperation with 36 other countries from the Global North and South, we’re examining the potential gap between journalistic ideals and practice through a content analysis of tens of thousands of stories from multiple platforms and the survey of thousands of journalists.
Here in Canada our sites of study are The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and National Post; CBC, CTV and Global’s national television newscasts; the CBC news website and the now shuttered HuffPost Canada; The World at Six broadcast on CBC radio; and our French sites of study, LaPresse, TVA’s Nouvelles, and Radio Canada’s l’heure du monde.
No matter what the organization, there is an expectation of digital presence. Journalists don’t just work in television, print, or broadcast, they are contributing to multiple platforms, often with a primary focus on digital delivery. And the data accessible as a result of digital delivery are changing what happens in newsrooms.
There are a variety of metrics that influence story development, from traffic measures like pageviews that give organizations a sense of the broader interest in a story–and continue to be tied to advertising mechanisms such as page impressions–and metrics like time spent that speak more to engagement, or how people are interacting with the content that is produced.
Segmentation of the audience
Increasingly, news organizations are gearing content to their loyal readers, versus relying on a broader audience as a primary source of revenue, and often content created for those loyal readers is put behind a paywall. This means different segments of an audience have different access to a particular organization’s stories–and different content might be promoted to different readers, depending on past behaviour, what an algorithm determines might be of interest to them, or how the content might make money.
This shift with regards to digital revenue means many organizations are focusing on subscriptions versus fly-by readers. That means loyal readers are deemed more important and metrics like conversions, or identifying what content someone interacted with before becoming a subscriber, can be more significant than pageviews–although pageviews continue to be a significant marker for ad sales and an easily understood signifier of success.
In a conversation with analytics experts from the American Press Institute, it was noted that media organizations are “segmenting” audiences and paying attention to multiple metrics for different reasons, even within what would have previously been thought of as one audience. It has a tool that can create blended engagement scores based on different goals for these audience segments.
For some articles targeted to get wider traffic, pageviews might be more important, for content created for loyal readers time spent and conversion might be more important. Organizations can place more or less weight on specific metrics for specific audience segments, in relation to how each type of audience might build revenue and/or as measures of success.
The impact of media logic
At one of our sites of study, the Toronto Star, most of the content is paywalled, but there are stories that include what they describe as affiliate links that appear to be open access. If a reader follows through to a product link that is embedded in one of these articles and buys that product, the Star receives revenue.
A study participant noted these articles were generally lifestyle stories written by freelancers, but also noted that it could be hard for readers to discern they’re different from any other story. Unrelated to the JRP study, Toronto Star columnist Vinay Menon wrote, “I always chuckle and then curse my overlords, the Gods of Fluff, when someone gets snippy about a column I’ve written and asks, ‘How is this news?’ It’s not news! Who said it was news?”
There’s research to support that readers can have trouble differentiating between paid, sponsored, or even ideologically-driven content over actual news, and that even the use of in-story descriptions to help clarify a story’s intent (which the Star does), has limited impact on perceived news credibility.
When something “looks like” news to a reader/viewer, it will often be perceived as news, a byproduct of media logic. The definitions journalists and scholars apply to journalism don’t necessarily hold meaning with audiences.
Marketing in the newsroom
The now shuttered HuffPost Canada also demonstrated how processes that used to be siloed within the marketing or advertising world are crossing over into digital newsrooms. It developed a system where writers had to pick who they were writing for before starting a story, with profiles of imagined readers created using audience data: Adela for “young millennials”; Adam for “middle millennials”; and Diana for 50-60 year old women.
One participant described it as “classic magazine marketing” where you pick an “audience funnel.” The practice was designed to reinforce that no story was targeted to “everyone” and that they needed to “place their bets” on who was most likely to read it. When a story was completed, the audience engagement team had a checklist of what needed to be done in order to ensure the story was as visible as possible, including whether it was posted to Facebook and Twitter and pitched to news curators such as Apple, who would push the story using their own algorithms. I’ve seen similar processes to amplify content used in other newsrooms in Canada, England, and Norway.
Although social media are an integral part of story distribution at many outlets, and reporters are often expected or at least encouraged to develop their own brand and promote their own work, this can be extraordinarily time consuming and open up reporters to toxic online abuse, particularly those who are racialized, LGBTQ+, and/or women.
A long-standing dilemma, with a data twist
In order to survive, newsrooms have to find new sources of revenue and explore new ways to tell stories. Audience data can help inform that process–and that’s not always a bad thing. It can lead to innovative storytelling and greater participation and input from the audience on where newsrooms should be spending time starting at the story development phase.
But, as noted by researchers at the Reuters Institute of Journalism, it’s also leading to people who might most benefit from good information having the least access to it, because they can’t or don’t want to pay for what’s behind a paywall, or news organizations see no fiscal benefit in trying to reach them. The best news is often developed for audiences that are already well-served, and white.
Additionally, although all news sites have to explore different revenue mechanisms, having what might be considered the most informative content paywalled, while content that is less impactful is fully accessible raises some critical questions with regards to journalistic ethics and the overarching goal of journalism to inform the public.
Developing the best digital stories, developing the best mechanisms to make money from digital stories, and having the best ethical practice in relation to sharing content don’t always align–but take out the word digital and you can pretty much say the same for all news from an historical perspective. The big difference now is the extensive and direct impact of data on the way stories are shaped, promoted, and shared.
