Making Peace with Metrics: Relational Work in Online News Production

Angèle Christin; Caitlin Petre

doi:10.6092/issn.1971-8853/11178

Authors

Angèle Christin Department of Communication, Stanford University http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7437-2013
Angèle Christin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. She studies how algorithms and analytics transform professional values, expertise, and work practices. Her book Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press, June 2020) focuses on the case of web journalism, analyzing the growing importance of audience data in web newsrooms in the U.S. and France. She is currently a Visiting Researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England.
Caitlin Petre School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University, Brunswick, NJ http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7846-9659
Caitlin Petre is an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the Rutgers University. She examines the social and material implications of an increasingly data-saturated world, with particular attention to the relationship between digital technologies, knowledge work, and media industries. Using field research methods, she analyzes how new sources of quantitative data interact with long-established approaches to cultural production and the management of media workers.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/11178

Keywords:

Journalism, Metrics, Relational Work, Zelizer, Matching

Abstract

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.

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Making Peace with Metrics: Relational Work in Online News Production

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