“Are we honestly so scared of numbers that we believe it will lead us to abandon our journalistic principles?” “Why on earth do we feel either that we can’t trust ourselves with the truth about our readers’ behavior or that we should make (usually very wrong) assumptions about it instead?” Moran wrote in an email. The Guardian digital audience editor Chris Moran is among those who have raised questions about publications that keep story traffic numbers hidden from reporters. Still others take a middle road, allowing limited access to metrics. Some sites, such as Gawker, have experimented with making pageviews a core part of reporters’ jobs by basing some aspects of pay on how much traffic their stories get, while others, such as The Verge, prefer their reporters avoid the temptation to pander to what’s popular. None of the others had an explicit policy forbidding editors from sharing analytics with reporters.įollow AJR on Twitter: many news organizations freely share site metrics with their staff members, the growing availability of pageview and engagement data raises thorny news judgment questions that editors and reporters are grappling with on a daily basis. That policy appears to be unusual for a news organization, judging by a sampling of 10 other publications contacted for this story. The publication also doesn’t broadly distribute access to Chartbeat, which provides real-time data on who is clicking on what stories. Patel said only the senior editorial leadership team can see the Google Analytics dashboard, which provides data on everything from pageviews to historical statistics. “He was basically like, ‘Yeah, we’re not gonna do that,” said Brandom, who was surprised because he was accustomed to checking his pageviews at his prior job as an intern for BuzzFeed.Įditors at The Verge said they don’t share detailed site metrics with writers because they want them to cover what’s important, not just what’s trendy. Translation: He tried to produce pieces the standard Verge reader might not expect, like this story on an Amazon shopper who fed a bot $50 a month to buy random items from the site.Ĭurious about how many people were reading his stories, Brandom asked managing editor Nilay Patel for access to The Verge’s Google Analytics account. When journalist Russell Brandom first came to The Verge, he was on the “weird” beat.
#MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS GAWKER SERIES#
Editor’s Note: This is the second post in a series examining the influence of analytics on how news is produced.
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