How the monetisation of personal metrics is leading to an individualist journalism
In an internal email circulated to staff in early March, the UK’s Telegraph Media Group described its plans to give salary incentives to those journalists whose audience retention metrics are converted into paid subscriptions to the Daily Telegraph website.
The Guardian published the leaked memo and some internal reactions from staff. In response, Chris Evans, the Telegraph’s editor, clarified that this measure was in no way about emphasising ‘clickbait’ content. Instead, Evans argued that the new initiative will help to strengthen the paper’s subscription model, rewarding journalists’ efforts in retaining readers.
The Telegraph Media Group’s approach is not new, and similar variations of such incentives have been used in newsrooms since real-time engagement metrics began to be shown on wall displays and personal screens. For instance, News Corp Australia reportedly offers incentives to journalists whose stories keep a certain number of subscribers engaged, or lead users to become new subscribers themselves.
In the United States, some outlets have implemented similar bonus schemes for journalists. Forbes has launched a newsletter strategy that allows individual journalists to promote articles via email and keep a share of the revenue produced by these pieces. Capturing users’ attention on websites attracts online advertisers, mitigating the move of ad revenue to niche advertising on social media platforms.
Still, some outlets that have experimented with such incentives in the past have abandoned them for various reasons. For example, the pressures they imposed on journalists led to the generation of more shorter pieces of journalism, and thereby to a subsequent decrease in content quality.
The Pursuit of Engagement Metrics in Journalism
The most relevant metrics in the news publishing business are page views and time spent on a given page. These metrics are the backbone of the industry: they track users’ behaviours, allow publishers to experiment with strategies for attracting new readers, and are used as evidence for advertisers that users are attracted to specific types of content.
Incentivising journalists’ pursuit of engagement metrics (or more simply rewarding the volume of content they produce) seems like a return to the gloomiest days of clickbait. For years, the news industry was trapped in the viral wars: propelled by the disruptions caused by social media, newsrooms started a desperate pursuit of engagement metrics.
As journalists themselves began to respond to the engagement metrics use social media to promote their content, they were thrust to the frontline of that battle. This new routine created additional pressures to increase productivity and efficiency and added a further dimension to the personalisation of content as journalists needed to know more about their audiences.
In practice, personal incentives open the door to the further individualisation of journalistic work. The quantification of labour at an individual level is in line with a greater neoliberal turn in modern workplaces. It trades collective identification of journalists with their news organisation for increased competition between individuals, and this increased focus on journalists as individuals has led to a profound shift in newsworkers’ professional identities.
Meanwhile, as some outlets are driving journalism towards increased individualisation, social media platforms are producing the promotional culture in which it can flourish. Announced in February, Twitter’s ‘Super Follow’ feature promises new opportunities to monetise tweets. Similarly, the recently launched platform Substack enables journalists who gain a certain number of followers to make money from newsletter subscriptions.
From viral wars to Star Wars
There are at least two problems with monetising newsrooms metrics in this way. First, the monetisation of personal metrics is conducive to a journalism that fails to accomplish its public functions. Journalists whose main focus is the pursuit of engagement metrics for their content are primarily working in their own interest, rather than in the interest of the public. This change in focus might lead to a change in their professional practices. For example, journalists working for platforms such as Substack follow the moderation policies without the mediation of editors, whose role is essential to guaranteeing the quality of newsgathering and verification.
Secondly, the focus on individual engagement metrics positions journalists as influencers catering to the appetite of their audiences. As with microcelebrities, journalists’ personality, authenticity, charisma, and, in many cases, an open admission of their personal tastes, interests, and even biases are fundamental to the process of growing audiences. But journalists are not influencers — or at least, should not be reduced to that role only. Even when they seek to make information more engaging and entertaining, their chief commitment must be to the production of information that enables citizens to make informed decisions.
Incentive models that are based on journalists’ abilities to entertain and engage as part of their branding routines entrench what many researchers have described as an ‘identity dilemma’: journalists have moved from keeping their traditional professional image and understanding these metrics as mere means for assessing their engagement with and personal connection to the audience on social media, and towards using those metrics as a tool in designing an individual commercial strategy.
As a result, significant questions remain about the consequences of such an incentive model for the quality of journalism and the way journalists do their work. Perhaps, some journalists will be successful in this model, but they will probably be focused on the opinion production and not on investigative content, which requires more time and resources. On the other hand, it is possible that in the future companies will prefer to hire journalists who bring an audience with them or who know what audience they want to reach. Ultimately, the speed of changes in the world of media and platforms will make us know the answers to these questions quickly or even these questions are already obsolete when other techno-economic models emerge.
The author would like to acknowledge and thank the comments and feedback for this article by Professor Axel Bruns, chief investigator of the News & Media focus area at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, Queensland University of Technology node
