Aggregating the News by Mark Coddington

Author:Mark Coddington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LAN008000, Language Arts & Disciplines/Journalism, SOC052000, Social Science/Media Studies
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2019-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

That’s what we need to do, is hitting that wave before it crashes…. We have to be able to recognize in the various sports, within society, etc., the things that are resonating, what’s interesting and what’s not quite broken through, and capitalize on that, and do that first. That’s where we have impact, not being the seventh person to write about [professional football star] Marshawn Lynch not talking [to the media].44

Here we have the source of significant tension between two attitudes toward metrics. On one hand, many aggregators spend so much time immersed in metrics that they’re inclined to operate with immense confidence in their ability to know their audiences’ preferences through metrics. They even do this to the point that they use those metrics to stand in for their own news judgment, as Social Post’s Christy did in the editorial meeting. But on the other hand, they’re also keenly aware of metrics’ limitations in guiding them toward long-term resonance or even in enabling them to predict which stories will generate the best metrics. This tension is not only about the efficacy of metrics but also about how well they can know their audiences at all. And it mostly hangs there unresolved. It’s visible when aggregators use metrics throughout their day but steadfastly assert that they have no real influence on their news judgment and when aggregators talk about their audiences’ desires with complete self-assurance but simply shrug when stories they had thought would gain a lot of traffic instead go nowhere. The specificity of their knowledge of their audiences’ interests exceeds that of almost every journalist in the profession’s modern history. Yet it’s not enough to guarantee that their efforts to cater to those interests will be successful.45

This reality gives a distinct tint of capriciousness and incomprehensibility to their pictures of the audience. At the socially driven aggregators in particular, virtually every story is produced because someone there thought it would find a substantial audience. But most of them don’t. At SportsPop, about fifteen of the site’s stories per day (less than half of its daily output) account for the significant majority of its traffic, according to Will, the editor. “The other twenty or thirty didn’t necessarily need to be written,” Will said—except that its staff didn’t know which of the articles would be the ones to hit. Throw forty stories a day up against a wall, and see which fifteen stick. “This has been a part of my job that I never really anticipated, to be honest,” one of SportsPop’s writers told me as he scanned SportsPop’s numbers on Chartbeat at his desk. “The longer I do it, the more confused I am.” There are days, he said, when “the internet just doesn’t care”—no matter what he and his colleagues write, it doesn’t get much traffic.46 None of them really understands why; they just have to convince their bosses that it’s not a meaningful indicator of the site’s direction. They’ve run up against the limitations of metrics as a way of understanding their audience, but it’s almost all they have.

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