News on the fly: journalist-audience online engagement success as a cultural matching process

Abstract

Looking at web analytics in newsrooms, journalism studies scholarship has explored the notion of success in using web analytics and metrics in measuring journalist-audience engagement. Scholars have looked at the role of organizational structures, cognition, and emotion in defining success with analytics. This article analyzes how journalists interpret journalist-audience engagement success using web analytics and what this reliance on web analytics might mean for contemporary news production. Using direct observation of newsrooms and interviews with news media workers, this article argues that media workers interpret success in audience engagement using web analytics as a process of cultural matching between web analytics companies, media workers, and audiences. This article shows that analytics in journalism have highlighted some of the shared values and practices across the matchers and revealed the challenges of measuring success in audience-journalist engagement.