Abstract
It is axiomatic today that newsrooms are awash in audience data. Editors typically know, as soon as a story goes live, how many people are reading it at any moment, where exactly they drop off, and how that compares to every other reporter’s work. Many news sites publicize some version of their current “most read” or “most shared” lists; inside the newsroom, performance stats circulate freely and may be posted to a central screen, like a scoreboard. “The numbers are always there, and they’re always staring you in the face,” one online reporter observes in Caitlin Petre’s remarkably illuminating study of newsroom metrics.
This marks a radical break from the long decades when—well into the 2000s—most journalists knew little and cared less about audience preferences and behavior. How have news organizations faced the rude dawn of a world where these data are impossible to ignore? How are metrics incorporated into day-to-day editorial routines and professional discourse? How do they change the relationship between editorial workers and newsroom managers? These questions are at the center of Petre’s lively and well-argued account, focused on how the new regime of quantification took shape in two iconic US news organizations: Gawker Media, the now-defunct avatar of metrics-driven journalism, and the New York Times, arguably better equipped than its rivals to resist the relentless commensurating drive of performance data. This revealing and often surprising comparison gains further depth from Petre’s third research site, the data provider Chartbeat, uncovering the discursive and affective labor that goes into making metrics palatable to working journalists.
All the News That’s Fit to Click triangulates across interviews and observations at these three sites to deepen our picture of how metrics matter in the daily work of making news. Petre has been in a vanguard of qualitative scholars studying newsroom metrics, and the book builds engagingly on recent scholarship as well as on journalistic accounts of the “hamster wheel” of editorial production today. The argument unfolds in clear prose that moves fluidly between description and analysis, using colorful quotes and telling details to capture the ludic, habit-forming quality of live performance data, and the stubborn uncertainty that persists even in metrics-drenched newsrooms. As one informant laments, “Like, looking at Chartbeat, what the fuck does that mean?”
A great strength of the book is Petre’s elucidating and ecumenical use of theory. She draws on a varied literature that runs from canonical work in journalism studies to ethnographies of games and gambling. Three intellectual pivot points guide the analysis: Max Weber’s notions of rationalization and disenchantment; studies of quantification and commensuration (e.g. from Theodore Porter, Wendy Nelson Espeland, and Mitchell L. Stevens); and, crucially, the tension between worker consent and coercion, both in and out of the creative industries (via Michael Burawoy, David Hesmondhalgh, Sarah Baker, and others). Petre uses these sources to illuminate rather than obfuscate, explaining key ideas fully and applying them convincingly to make sense of what her informants say about their work, their bosses, and their rivals.
That framing acts as a scaffold for her own inductive reasoning. The heart of the analysis consists of the kind of descriptive, bottom-up sociological insights that seem obvious only after someone points them out. Petre persuasively illustrates the various ways Chartbeat performs deference to journalistic values, the reasons the “traffic game” is so addicting to reporters, and the direct consequences this has in the newsroom: extracting greater productivity but also obscuring management’s hand and directing competition inward. She shows us the two kinds of uncertainty attached to newsroom metrics—what they mean and what to do about it—and then the different strategies editors used to manage this data, and protect their own authority, in the two news outlets. An especially eye-opening treatment applies Mary Douglas’ work on purity to make sense of the shifting lines journalists draw between clean and dirty uses, or users, of newsroom metrics—and to uncover the work this does in reconciling professional norms to the exigencies of what reporters themselves call “traffic whoring.”
Even readers well-versed in recent studies of digital newsrooms will find surprises in Petre’s account. The view into workplace culture at the hugely influential but widely derided Gawker Media is particularly revealing. It is striking to learn just how assiduously reporters and editors there defended its journalistic integrity, reserving their own scorn for rivals like Buzzfeed and Upworthy. (“That is a formula. That’s, you leave a cliffhanger at the end of every headline so you have to click to figure out what the goddamn story’s about. … That is cynical,” one informant fumes.) More than that, Petre shows how writers for Gawker understood metrics as exerting discipline but also affording a different sort of freedom, from the rigid editorial rules and hierarchies taken for granted at elite outlets. Is this just false consciousness? Petre resists this easy answer, taking seriously her informants’ experience of quantified production while chronicling how it served management interests.
This is what Petre calls the “autonomy paradox,” and it sets up the book’s most counterintuitive argument: that the deep embrace of quantification paved the way for unionization drives at Gawker and similar outlets, not because reporters rejected metrical surveillance and discipline as inherently dehumanizing, but because the version of journalistic autonomy that emerged in these newsrooms was conducive to labor organizing. As she puts it, “Gawker’s rejection of the trappings of traditional journalistic professionalism may have made staffers more readily able to identify as workers.”
Scholars, students, and journalists alike will learn a great deal from the nuanced and probing picture this book gives us of work in the contemporary digital newsroom. It’s important to note, of course, that the experience of workplace metrics will vary in other media systems, and in less iconic, local, or chain-run US outlets, especially as layoffs and cutbacks continue. Petre’s absorbing account offers a clear roadmap for future studies of the rationalization of labor in digital journalism.
