The Social Life of Metrics: The Entanglement of Expertise and Analytics in the U.S. News Industry

• In Event: 579 - Section on Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 08. Algorithmic Culture

Abstract

How do new forms of quantified standards interact with established ways of knowing? While existing scholarship has generally conceptualized the relationship between performance analytics and expert judgment as antagonistic, this article draws on the case of online audience metrics in the U.S. news industry to argue that the two can in fact become deeply entangled. I examine the production, interpretation, and use of audience analytics via ethnographic, interview, and textual data from two sites: Chartbeat, a popular analytics service that specializes in providing metrics to newsrooms, and the New York Times, a highly prestigious and established news organization and longtime Chartbeat client. I find that entanglement between metrics and journalistic judgment occurs in two stages. First, because Chartbeat must market its analytics dashboard to the very same social actors whose performance it is measuring, the dashboard is purposefully designed to assuage journalists’ fears of displacement. The tool accomplishes this by communicating allegiance to traditional journalistic values and deference to journalists’ editorial judgment. Second, editors tightly control the circulation and interpretation of analytics in the newsroom in ways that minimize the data’s threat to their authority and maximize its managerial utility. The article concludes by arguing that as networked tracking technologies become increasingly widespread and commercial, the relationship between quantitative performance measures and established forms of expert judgment are likely to become less antagonistic and more entangled.

Author

• Caitlin Petre, Yale University