METRIC POWER
As with any commercial business, what is of course greatly valued is profit. The al gorithmic potential is less about the specific code than it is about the economic promise that algorithms provide, and their perceived capacity to act on the data in new ways. If algorithms promise to reduce production and circulation costs, there might not be much to argue against. As Stig Jakobsen, editor-in-chief at the local Norwegian newspaper iTromsø, told me when I interviewed him in May 2016, the choice of implementing an algorithm to personalize the “mobile-front” of the newspaper was rather easy: “If you find something that gives you 28% more trafic, as we have done, all you can do is say thank you” (Interview 2, May 2016).11 We may call this the pragmatic route. Here quantification and the measurement of trafic is the new language of success, readily supported by algorithms that allow for seemingly objective decision making. Increased access to user data implies new insights and new possibilities for action. Jakobsen, who came to the local newspaper in mid-2015 after having spent much of his career in the magazine business as founder and editor-in-chief of some of the biggest Scandinavian lifestyle magazines, says real-time analytics and algorithms promise to support more informed journalistic decisions. In the magazine business as in journalism more generally, decisions were often taken purely on the basis of a “gut feeling.” In times of economic hardship, however, a “gut feeling” is too risky, while metrics and numbers can potentially save you many unnecessary missteps. Though Jakobsen is enthusiastic about the seemingly objective promise of algorithms to deliver more relevant news to the right readers, he is careful not ascribe too much power to algorithms as such. The algorithm is merely a tool that can be used to make sure the right news reaches the right person, Jakobsen suggests, “If you are not interested in Justin Bieber, the algorithm will not recommend that article for you” (Interview 2, May 2016).
The power of metrics to influence editorial decisions, however, is not new (Anderson, 2011; Domingo, 2008; Vu, 2014). As journalism scholar Chris W. Anderson (2011) describes, based on his ethnographic research in Philadelphia newsrooms, new measurement and web trafic tools have contributed to the emergence of a “generative, creative audience.” Anderson found that “Editors were clearly adjusting their understanding of ‘what counted’ as a good news story based on the quantified behavior of website readership” (2011: 562). For digital director at the Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten, Jens Nicolaisen, the extent to which big data and new computational tools provide actionable insights is one of the most promising avenues for the news business. As Nicolaisen sees it, the widespread use of analytics and metrics inside newsrooms has resulted in something of a power shift in journalism more broadly. Previously, the news was largely produced from the inside out, he says, without too much thought dedicated to what readers actually wanted to read. This lack of journalistic responsiveness to audience desires was most famously observed by Herbert Gans in his seminal work Deciding What’s News (1979). Gans notes that he was surprised to find how litle knowledge about the actual audience existed within newsrooms: “Although they had a vague image of the audience, they paid litle atention to it” (Gans 1979: 229). Today, however, Nicolaisen observes, value creation increasingly starts from the outside—with what users actually click on, what they say they are interested in, what they share and talk about in social media (Interview 3, February 2015).
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