This document discusses how news organizations are managing their use of social media and metrics. It covers how news outlets are establishing social media guidelines for journalists, managing personal branding on platforms, and using various social media metrics to optimize content. It also addresses challenges like uncertainty around which metrics to prioritize, the influence of platforms and algorithms, and balancing popular and revenue-generating content with journalistic priorities. News organizations are experimenting with new formats and practices to engage audiences on social platforms.

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Management and Metrics:
The News Industry and Social Media
Prof. Axel Bruns
Guest Professor, IKMZ, University of Zürich
a.bruns@qut.edu.au — a.bruns@ikmz.uzh.ch

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Journalism and Social Media
• Last week:
• The reluctant, gradual, grudging adoption of social media by individual journalists
• This week:
• The growing use of social media (and social media metrics) by news organisations
• Next week:
• Liveblogging as an attempt to blend journalistic and social media practices

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Setting Standards

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Managing Emerging Journalistic Practices
• Social media guidelines:
• Personal accounts and their presentation
• Personal views or professional language
• Engagement with sources, colleagues, and audiences
• Breaking news on social media or promoting stories on the news site
• Promoting competitors
• ‘[Sky News] journalists were not allowed to retweet any message originating from
someone who is not affiliated [with the outlet]’ — Opgenhaffen and Scheerlinck
• ‘I would find that unfortunate. Precisely because in part I really use Twitter personally as
a sort of way to vent my thoughts’ — journalist qtd. in Opgenhaffen and Scheerlinck

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Managing Personal Branding
• Personal branding:
• Journalists appearing on social media as themselves, not for news organisations
• Social media influencer logic, but directing attention away from the news brand
• ‘that is great for them but there are some editors who struggle to understand how that is
great for the Telegraph” — Kate Day qtd. in Newman
• Attracting unwanted attention, personal attacks, stalking, …
• Especially journalists who are women, from minority backgrounds, controversial
• Potential repercussions for the news organisation itself

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https://about.abc.net.au/reports-publications/personal-use-of-social-media-guidance-note/

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News Organisations
and Social Media Metrics

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(http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/publications/2016/editorial-analytics-2016/)

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(Cherubini & Nielsen 2016: 13)

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(Cherubini & Nielsen 2016: 26)

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But, Which Metrics?

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(Cherubini & Nielsen 2016: 36)

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(Cherubini & Nielsen 2016: 38)
(Cherubini & Nielsen 2016: 41)

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Uncertainty and
Experimentation

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Some Provocations (from 2016)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVFP-ANV9u4

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Quantifying Journalism
‘systematic analysis of quantitative data on various aspects of audience
behavior’ ― Federica Cherubini and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
‘basically, contemporary forms of analytics are very good at understanding the
main ways in which people used digital media in 2010’ ― Cherubini and Nielsen
‘“It’s like crack,” he said, grinning. “You can sit here and watch it, popping
all night.”’ ― newsroom manager interviewed by Edson Tandoc Jr.
 a feedback loop between newsroom gatekeeping and audience gatewatching
‘the natural inclination, if one metric is seen as the important, true metric
… is to game it’ ― Jonah Peretti
‘Buzzfeed has been built around the proposition that distribution of
journalism will happen primarily through social networks’ ― Jonah Peretti

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New Experiments
• Social media optimisation:
• An offshoot of search engine
optimisation (SEO), but for
social media
• A/B testing of different story
headlines, image/video
selections, etc.
• Rearranging story placement
and promotion on the news
site
• Presenting metrics directly to
audiences
https://blog.tjcx.me/p/new-york-times-ab-testing / news.com.au

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Popular? Populist?
‘the most read and best-rated articles or most watched videos gain prominence and are implicitly
considered as more important and hence more relevant, while they’re just more popular’ — Heinderyckx
‘most would agree that journalism’s purpose cannot be reduced to “giving the
people what they want”’ — Loosen & Schmidt
‘I don’t think that we have the luxury of thinking that way because if the company’s not making
money then I might get laid off. I mean, that’s just the way it is’ — journalist qtd. in Tandoc Jr.
‘analytics and data metrics will continue to evolve, and if journalists are not part of that process,
the tools and techniques developed will continue to reflect and empower commercial and
technological priorities more than editorial priorities’ — Cherubini & Nielsen
‘we look at lots of metrics, but ultimately the raw material is people coming up with creative ideas’ — Peretti

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Platforms, Algorithms,
Money – and Audiences

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Platform Power
‘journalists … are a pretty useful source of marketing for Twitter’ ― Ali Nobil Ahmad
‘transforming newspaper websites into appendages of Americanized
corporate information capitalism’ ― Ali Nobil Ahmad
‘65% of the digital ad revenue pie is swallowed up by just five tech
companies’ ― Pew Research Center
‘a trade-off between control of your own journalism, versus reaching large
audiences’ ― Emily Bell
‘we are definitely not a media company, but we do recognise that we play
an important role and that means we have responsibilities’
― Facebook VP John Hegeman
 need to re-route some revenue streams from platforms to content producers

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The
Irish
Sun:
“What
did
Mark
Zuckerberg
tell
Congress
and
did
the
Facebook
CEO
address
the
Cambridge
Analytica
data
leak
in
his
testimony?”
https://www.thesun.ie/news/2426061/what-did-mark-zuckerberg-tell-congress-and-did-the-facebook-ceo-address-the-cambridge-analytica-data-leak-i

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Where Will the Funding Come From?
‘the industry’s decade-long search for a working business model for the Web
edition itself has not been successful’ — Ju et al.
‘in some smaller countries, protected by language, people are twice as likely to pay’
— Newman et al.
‘[providing online news for free was] one of the most far-reaching collective failures of
the media industries’ — Hanitzsch
‘business problems for many publishers have worsened with the rise of ad-blocking’
— Newman et al.
‘are newspapers repeating the same “mistake” by giving content away for free to
[social media] users and by granting audience access to aggregators?’ — Ju et al.

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New Formats
• Optimising news for:
• Individual story access (atomised news stories)
• News snacking (short, shallow news consumption sessions)
• Mobile access (in transit and on the go)
• Promotion by influencers and personal news brands
 normalising social media use in journalistic practice,
 or normalising journalism into social media logics?
‘now that journalists have a direct line to their audience, they have begun to act differently than they
would in other news arenas … . Their focus is still the news, but they are taking on different roles—
commentator, heckler, interpreter, marketer, and so on’ — Molyneux

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Audience Power
‘Twitter is a distribution channel for news that is not controlled by the news media.
Journalists tweet links to their news articles, but it is the distributed response of the Twitter
community that determines whether that news spreads’ — Orellana-Rodriguez et al.
‘with social media, journalism and audiences meet on uncommon ground’ — Loosen and Schmidt
‘while the old struggle for social domination and counter-domination continues in the new
media space, the structural bias of this space toward the powers that be is being
diminished every day by the new social practices of communication’ — Castells
‘journalists enter but do not control these newer media spaces, which operate
according to principles that challenge professional boundaries on different levels’
— Revers
‘journalistic outlets, then, might have to adapt to the rules of collaboration. And this includes a
self-image of being just one node among many others’ — Heinrich

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Next Time

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Readings
7. 4.11.: Management and Metrics: The News Industry and Social Media
Bruns, A. (2018). Management and Metrics: The News Industry and Social Media. Gatewatching
and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. Ch. 6. Peter Lang.
8. 11.11.: Hybrid News Coverage: Liveblogs
Bruns, A. (2018). Hybrid News Coverage: Liveblogs. Gatewatching and News Curation:
Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. Ch. 7. Peter Lang.

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Lecture
• NOTE:
• Week 8 lecture will be in person in BIN-0-K.02 – see you there!