"The newsroom was electric," an editor told me after the discovery of nine-year-old Shannon Matthews, who went missing for 24 days in February 2008. "Minutes after publishing the story, we watched the clicks go up like a petrol pump. In just an hour, we had 60,000 hits!"
As newspapers and broadcasters move online they are finding new ways to judge what makes a big story. Using the latest "web analytics" technologies, publishers can now monitor the trails of the "clickstream"—a measure of what their users are choosing to read, watch and share. Newsrooms now feature both giant flat screens suspended from the ceiling and small desktop widgets that shower staff with a relentless flow of web statistics. Never before has the marketplace of journalism been so visible.
This brave new world has positive aspects. Media companies can offer precisely targeted "behavioural" advertising, allowing their clients to aim messages at well-defined groups of users. Some are even using the tools of neuroscience to measure the subconscious foundations of the clickstream—drawing on biometric data (brainwave activity, eye tracking and skin response) to assess the effectiveness of online advertising formats. When advertising budgets are being squeezed, such innovations may save the media industry's skin.
The new technology also helps news organisations to learn how their customers like to get their news. Fierce online competition is making websites better (through videos, collaborative maps or new virtual worlds), creating new forms of audience interaction (via blogs and message boards) and new styles of writing (oriented around hyperlinks and "semantic meta-data"). It's forcing them to share and collaborate too: in early March the Guardian announced that it was giving third-party developers free access to all its digital infrastructure. Most importantly, the clickstream provides editors with feedback that helps them to repackage previously less popular but important news—like stories from Afghanistan—for the widest possible audience. It could make public service content more accessible—and all news more engaging and relevant.
The irony of this was not lost on the satirical magazine the Onion, which ran a (joke) story in 2007 claiming that the "most emailed" list was "tearing the New York Times newsroom apart." Under pressure to "craft articles with those magical 'click and send' qualities," the article claimed, Pulitzer prizewinning reporters had "requested transfers to the Home & Garden and Travel desks," where their digital profile is more likely to bloom.
Yet such things are, in truth, deadly serious. As newspaper circulation figures fall sharply, especially in local and regional markets, it's only logical for publishers to huddle under an umbrella of popular stories. By reflecting the interests of the crowd, they can attract millions of eyeballs and more advertising. This process, in turn, artificially narrows news around a handful of "tent pole" stories—like Shannon Matthews or the plight of Jade Goody. It is then also easier (and cheaper) to pad your content with pre-packaged material from the wires or PRs. Stories that need to be found, developed and verified by an international network of permanent staff are expensive by comparison. And the clickstream can certainly send a strong signal of fatigue too. This was especially true during the war in Gaza. As the war dragged on, web traffic for Gaza stories fell sharply. The knowledge that this seemingly important story was actually a turn-off put pressure on editors to scale back reporting of the conflict both in their papers and online.
Today only a handful of publishers seem impervious to such temptations—mainly those whose costs are subsidised, like the Guardian (via the Scott Trust) and the BBC (via the licence fee), or whose business model rests on providing expert analysis, like the FT. The majority, by contrast, are exposed to an unprecedented shift in the demand for news.
The dangers of blindly following the crowd here are clear. As Paul Starr argued recently in the New Republic, journalists have long been "our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems." New technologies offer a great opportunity but, if mishandled, the future of civil society is in peril.
