Thread by @kenzalamot

This news article “Drunk man helps emergency services search for himself” appeared on the website of a Flemish newspaper. Would you consider clicking on it? #ThesisThread 🧵1/

You may not, but it was recently one of their most read articles on the news website. It may not come as a surprise that these “most read lists” are often filled with the “softer news”, funny or bizarre articles rather than the harder, political or economic news. 2/

We don’t think about it that much, but our behavior on news websites is increasingly put into numbers by #analytics software. That is then aggregated into metrics like “clicks” or “time on page” that give an indication of popularity. But what are those numbers good for?📊3/

That’s what I’ve investigated in my PhD “Metrics For News” #UAfsw.
⚙️How do journalists use these analytics?
♥️And would using those analytics bring journalists to pursue mostly the softer news that is often more popular?
Follow this #ThesisThread and I'll you show you👇4/

First, we did in-depth interviews with Flemish digital news editors of a broad variety of national media outlets (newspapers, television, news magazines, news websites)🎙️What could they tell us about the adoption of analytics in their newsrooms? 5/

These digital editors used analytics to decide on 1⃣placement 2⃣presentation 3⃣selection of news articles, to 4⃣imitate popular articles of competing news media 5⃣for soft performance evaluation of journalists and as 6⃣proxy for public opinion 6/

Interesting, but let's be honest: that's their job! But how do individual journalists think about those analytics and how do they use them? Glad you asked, because we investigated this through a survey with 231 political journalists. 7/

Most journalists are familiar with the use of analytics in their newsroom, but only a small group actually monitors traffic to the website themselves. The majority of journalists are only informed about analytics and metrics by their news chief. While the former group is ... 8/

really positive about them, the latter is much more skeptical. Overwhelming journalists with data has a counterintuitive effect, making them less engaged. This split between writers and their digital editors who want to measure those articles is particularly thought-provoking! 9/

Lastly, how the journalists reacted to analytics data also varied from the more accepting less experienced journalists💁‍♀️ to the more senior writers that were much more reticent to change anything with their news practices🙅‍♀️10/

We also did an experiment to see whether journalists would take analytics into account when making decisions👩‍🔬 They had to rank 5 news headlines from most to least newsworthy🔝 Journalists in the experimental group received analytics📊 the ones in the control group did not❌11/

Jackpot!🏆 We found that journalists ranked stories with 📈popularity systematically higher than journalists in the control group. Stories with📉popularity were ranked lower. But this effect was only there for the softer news items! 12/

Okay, we've one clue about the relationship between analytics and soft news. Would journalists actually “soften” their news on Facebook in response to metrics? And is it merely clicks that they chase?🖱️I’ve sought it out for you analyzing more than 10,000 news articles🔍 13/

I was one lucky researcher to have access to “clicks”, “time on page” and Facebook likes, shares and comments by collaborating with the news outlets. I knew perfectly which articles were popular and which were not. Do these metrics mainly favor softer news? 14/

Well, it depends on the metric we’re looking at. Soft news mainly seems to generate lots of clicks and Facebook interactions, while we see a higher amount of time spent on page for the harder news items such as political news 15/

Now let’s focus on the output side👀 First of all, the Facebook news supply still offers a good mix of hard and soft news. But compared to the website it was slightly softer and it also featured less political and economic news⬇️ 16/

When connecting the dots between news production and metrics, we conclude that journalists mostly cater to clicks and interactions when deciding which news to publish on Facebook. However, responding to the metric "time on page" could result in a different news supply! 17/

What to remember from the PhD? Analytics have conquered the newsroom and are here to stay. They have created new practices for journalists and have led to a slight softening of the news supply. But softening can also be good, as it provides a more human angle to news 18/

All-in-all, it’s complicated to reconcile journalistic and commercial goals. Caution must be applied using these analytics and challenges lie ahead if journalists want to use them in an informed way so that both journalism and readers will benefit⚠️19/

Thank you for joining me on this #ThesisThread @VLIRnws. If you’re intrigued and interested to learn more, I’ll gladly hit you up with the PDF version of the dissertation or the separate papers 🔗 Stay curious and remember #WomenAlsoKnowStuff 20/