Imagining the Online as the Offline: Metrics, Journalism, History, and Teetering at the Abyss
By Anjali DasSarma
When faced with unimaginable conflict and strife within our media systems and the world order more broadly, there are two mindsets and plans of action: one based in hope (an upward), and one based in despair (a downward). The “upward” requires an imaginary that does not fit within the current Western economy nor current hegemonic Western societal values, and is often discarded as “impossible.” This year’s Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy was entitled “Media at the Abyss: War, Deglobalization, and the Diplomatic Response.” Media at the Abyss has a depressingly true ring to it, one that drags the mind downward and forces even the most optimistic academic to rethink a cheery disposition. However, what happened at this years’ Milton Wolf Seminar revealed insights that did not rely solely on optimism for optimism’s sake, but instead took up the “upward” to think together on the topic of the Abyss with great fervour and electricity. Most galvanizing were those who boldly pointed to the notion that platform capitalism exemplifies exactly what the name implies: a reification of the capitalistic and sociological challenges that so readily plague the day-to-day in the space of the offline.
One important turning point is uniquely introduced as a new and vengeful compatriot of technological exploitation: the datafication/metrification of newspapers online. Whereas once an editor or audience analyst would have needed to design a survey to ask readers individually which news article they enjoyed and which news article they ignored, measuring the consumption of news has become simple. Clickbait or not, clicks count. Engagement is quantifiable. Metrics have made it quick and easy to place journalism and journalists into a game of very visible and often emphasized numbers.
The systemic problems that plague journalism have been recorded extensively, as the information sphere becomes more and more muddied, both with advertising challenges and political economic market failure. Victor Pickard’s “The violence of the market” describes the “telltale symptoms” of journalism’s extreme commercialism as labour precarity based on “an emphasis on clickbait and deceptive and invasive forms of advertising as news outlets chase ever-diminishing digital ad revenues” (Pickard, 2019). The market of journalism fails by design.
As described in Caitlin Petre’s All the News That's Fit to Click, the 2011 leak of AOL’s document to Business Insider spilled the beans, in that AOL’s CEO, Tim Armstrong, was “stepping on the gas” when it came to profits, or rather, that the company cared more about profits than content:
[Armstrong] wants pageviews per story to jump from 1,500 to 7,000. He wants video stories to go from being 4% of all stories produced to 70%. He wants the percentage of stories optimized for search engines to reach 95%. We know all this, because right now, Armstrong's lieutenants are making their way through the company's many editorial divisions, training them on ‘The AOL Way.’ (Carlson, 2011).
As a solution to this, some point to the hypothetical production of a database that might collect qualitative responses to measure the impact of a story, including comments, discourse on social media or letters to the editor, instead of just collecting quantitative clicks (Stray, 2012). But until a mainstream movement emerges in favour of this, metrics as a phenomenon for quantifying engagement is widespread, and more outlets face the question of choosing clicks over more significant engagement. Dean Starkman coined “The Hamster Wheel” to describe the nature of this quantification: “[it] isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. [It’s] volume without thought… news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics” (Starkman, 2010).
At the seminar, during one panel, a participant shared that he, along with the rest of the journalistic outlets’ staff, receives real time news engagement statistics every morning. These emails come in narrative form, internally informing journalists of the top 20 most read stories on the site. Though he did not touch on the notion of how these statistics might be internalized, one study suggests that internalizing metrics may occur, and can impact news choices (Arenberg and Lowrey, 2018). When they were first introduced into the journalistic process, metrics were branded and framed as allowing and encouraging journalists to democratize their coverage toward what “the people” wanted to read. However, as Pickard writes, “the metrification of news labor is [in actuality] yet one more blow to the dignity and quality of life for news workers, and increasingly other creative and knowledge-work sectors as well” (Pickard, 2021).
This is not to insinuate that there is some basis for newness surrounding newspapers being based on profit motives, just that it has become far more readily accessible to commercial interests. In fact, it is crucial to emphasize that the commercialization of journalism is journalism, and at the start of the newspaper industry in the United States, commercialization was also steeped in slavery and racism. The first year of the first long running American newspaper, The Boston News-Letter, reveals that the advertising section prospered alongside the paper’s articles, beginning with the first issue, where the editor, John Campbell, published a notice to those who might want to pay for advertisements in the paper:
THis News Letter is to be continued Weekly; and all Persons who have any Houses, Lands, Tenements, Farmers, Ships Vessels, Goods, Wares or Merchadizes,&c. To be Sold, or Lett; or Servants Run away; or Goods Stoll or Lost, may have the same Inserted at a Reasonable Rate; from Twelve Pence to Five Shillings and not to exceed. (“THis News Letter,” 1704)
The first advertisement for an unfree person appeared in the June 5, 1704 issue (“TWo Negro men,” 1704). The enslaver, a merchant, is named, while the four people being sold are not. The advertisement offers two Black men, a Black woman, and a child for purchase. This type of advertisement made up a significant portion of the advertisements published over the course of the first year. In addition, these advertisements, which journalism profited from and built the industry from, continued over the next century, carving out journalism’s legacy as one of violence (DasSarma and Fisher, 2023).
These advertisements reveal a history that should not be ignored or overlooked when examining the metrification of journalism. Both of these concepts rely on capitalism and rely on commercialization. Advertising for Black and Indigenous people means that the commercial foundation of journalism is impossible to disentangle from the foundations of slavery. Metrification relies on the commercialization of information, giving preference to those with the financial means to participate in the attention economy: to pay for and pay attention to news. Over the years, the American commercialization of news has morphed from a very explicit racist financial structure to a strong, but perhaps more obfuscated, metric-based industry that privileges articles with clicks (regardless of whether the clicks are for true engagement or clickbait). In turn, journalism steeped in metrification practices also privileges those with the money to pay for the access to the articles.
During the first panel, The Rhetoric and Realities of Deglobalization, one individual referenced a fracturing of traditional media structures. However, to understand this fracturing, and the newfound Abyss (especially as it relates to digital spaces), the history of “traditional” media needs to be more fully grappled with. The panelist also pointed to the vulnerabilities of online spaces. These spaces should be understood as extensions of offline spaces, sharing the same massive challenges that inflict violence upon marginalized people across the globe. And though the digital brings metrics along as newly toxic invasive species, American journalistic spaces have been nefariously commercialized and subservient to capitalism for as long as they have existed.
What we ask from our media systems is directly dependent on what we ask from each other. Throughout the seminar, panelists brought up the tensions between reporting for unity and nationalism during wartime, the tensions between parachute journalism and ethnography, the tensions between globalization and culture, the tensions between localization and globalization and the tensions between the commercial and the independent. What could it mean to take up these tensions as challenges which exist both off and online? What could it mean to understand journalistic metrification as simply a symptom of the broader market failure of journalism? What avenues could that offer us? Would they lead us from the teetering edge of the Abyss? What if we knew our histories? John Nerone wrote that within journalism history, and the teaching of journalism history, the focus on “facts” can be dangerous for understanding history: “facts are important, but they are not what history is about. History is rather a way of thinking about the facts… History is a form of discourse that confers power” (Nerone, 1990).
During the Platforms and Demagogues: The Future of Digital Monopolies session, panelists questioned what it means for outlets to purposefully curate and develop content for optimization. It is vital that the structures upon which digital monopolies prey are understood as constructed to be a part of the monopolies. The histories of the print inform the digital of the future. The notion of knowing one's history to understand the contemporary digital spaces was emphasized by some panelists, including one who put it quite succinctly: we all need to be historians.
References
Carlson, N. (2011, February 1). LEAKED: AOL’s Master Plan. Business Insider.
Petre, C. (2021). All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists. Princeton University Press.
Pickard, V. (2021, October 23). Management by Metrics Is Upending Newsrooms and Killing Journalism.
Pickard, V. (2019). The violence of the market. Journalism, 20(1), 154–158.
Starkman, D. (2010, October). The Hamster Wheel. Columbia Journalism Review.