Edson C. Tandoc

The Ethics of Web Analytics

The collection and reporting of audience data through Web analytics is reshaping the news construction process, with journalists now aware of what their online audiences want. A more important question than understanding this process of adoption of Web analytics in the newsroom is how access to audience metrics impacts on the journalism that journalists produce. In this essay, we pose three interconnected concerns about the use of Web analytics in journalism, guided by journalism’s communitarian role. First, we warn of the danger of viewing the audience as disaggregated segments based on consumer preference. Second, we argue against choice as a moral end and call for distinction between the public interest and what the public is interested in. Finally, we warn against the dangers of journalism studies romanticizing the audience and arguing too strongly against journalistic autonomy.

THE JOURNALIST IS MARKETING THE NEWS

This study, based on case studies of three online newsrooms, seeks to understand the patterns of how journalists use social media in their news work. Through 150 hours of observations and interviews with 31 journalists, the study found that journalists are normalizing social media while also reworking some of their norms and routines around it, a process of journalistic negotiation. They are balancing editorial autonomy and the other norms that have institutionalized journalism, on one hand, and the increasing influence exerted by the audience—perceived to be the key for journalisms survival—on the other. In doing so, journalists are also seeing a reworking of their traditional gatekeeping role, finding themselves having to also market the news.

Defining “Fake News”

This paper is based on a review of how previous studies have defined and operationalized the term “fake news.” An examination of 34 academic articles that used the term “fake news” between 2003 and 2017 resulted in a typology of types of fake news: news satire, news parody, fabrication, manipulation, advertising, and propaganda. These definitions are based on two dimensions: levels of facticity and deception. Such a typology is offered to clarify what we mean by fake news and to guide future studies.

The affordance effect: Gatekeeping and (non)reciprocal journalism on Twitter

Abstract This study examines contemporary gatekeeping as it intersects with the evolving technological affordances of social media platforms and the ongoing negotiation of professionalized journalistic norms and routines in contentious politics. Beginning with a corpus of just over 4.2 million Tweets about the racially charged Ferguson, Missouri protests, a series of network analyses were applied to track shifts over time and to identify influential actors in this communicative space. These models informed further analyses that indicated legacy news organizations and affiliated journalists were least present and only marginally engaged in covering these events, and that other users on Twitter emerged as far more prominent gatekeepers. Methodological considerations and implications about the importance of dialogic and reciprocal activities for journalism are discussed.

The pseudo-events paradox: How pseudo-events flood the Philippine press and why journalists don't recognize it

In 1961, Daniel Boorstin introduced the concept of ‘pseudo-events’, or false realities, which he said had been flooding the American press. Four decades later, testing his concept on the Philippine press, this study finds that his observation still holds true. This exploratory study, using content analysis of 2330 news articles and a survey of 100 journalists, also suggests the existence of the ‘pseudo-events paradox’. The study finds that while journalists perceive that there are more spontaneous events in their work, and that these have better chances of being published, published news articles about pseudo-events actually outnumber those based on spontaneous events. It is argued that the news sources have taken advantage of the institutional constraints in news gathering, creating pseudo-realities that journalists, trapped by their own routines, value judgments, and hunger for stories, find difficult to resist. This leads journalists to accommodate pseudo-events, staged by the most accessible sources, like politicians, and gathered by the easiest data gathering methods, like the press conference, the press release, and the interview. These findings point to the disintegration of what Habermas had ideally termed as the ‘public sphere’ into a ‘pseudo-public sphere’, where the staged realities of private, powerful individuals able to manipulate the press clutter public consciousness. This gives the public the illusion that democracy is at work when it is crumbling.

The Audience-Oriented Editor

Spurred by the increasingly central role of audience metrics in the editorial process, a new set of roles is being introduced in the newsroom primarily focused on navigating audience data. This paper aims to understand these emerging audience-oriented roles and to what extent considerations of the audience figures in editorial choices. This paper draws from a set of 15 in-depth interviews with engagement editors, social media editors and audience editors from different media systems around the world. Three major findings emerge: First, the definition of engagement is almost entirely centered on different types of metrics. Second, while audience-oriented editors take part in the editorial process, their role is to help journalists negotiate between the information obtained by their metrics and their journalistic intuition to make editorial decisions. Third, there is a lack of cohesiveness regarding what these newsroom positions are and how they operate. The paper contributes to the growing literature on the pervasiveness of metrics and quantification of journalistic processes by offering a more nuanced understanding of a new set of editorial roles.

Small Departures, Big Continuities?

Through a content analysis of big data journalism stories from The Guardian (N = 260), a pioneer in contemporary big data journalism, we sought to investigate how the practice of big data journalism compares with traditional news values, norms, and routines. Findings suggested that big data journalism shows new trends in terms of how sources are used, but still generally adhere to traditional news values and formats such as objectivity and use of visuals.

Bridging the Gap: Journalists’ role orientation and role performance on Twitter

Combining a content analysis of 760 tweets and a survey of journalists who tweeted them, this study revisits the questioned assumption that journalists’ conception of their roles manifests in their journalistic outputs. Studies that have tested this assumption instead found a gap between role orientation and performance, possibly explained by how journalistic outputs are organizational products. Thus, this study focused on role performance as observed in journalists’ individual posts on Twitter, a social media platform that has been normalized and now embedded in news routines. If tweets are personal outputs, they should bear the imprint of the journalists who posted them. The findings of this study lend support to this claim.

Watching Over the Watchdogs

Studying the problems that journalists face is important, considering the role that journalists play in reporting about and legitimizing the problems that confront society. This study explores what journalists in the Philippines, a young democracy with a unique media ecology, consider to be the most important problem they face. Drawing on a survey of 349 Filipino journalists, this study found that journalists in the Philippines are most concerned about low pay, media violence, information access, and professionalism. Younger journalists tend to identify low pay as the most important problem, while the problem of violence against journalists was more salient for reporters than for editors and managers.

The People Have Spoken (The Bastards?): Finding a legitimate place for feedback in the journalistic field

Bourdieu’s field theory presents a distinction between the autonomy of a field and the heteronomity of the fields that surround and potentially encroach on it. Journalism is one such field which attempts to maintain its autonomy in the face of change imposed from beyond its boundaries. This paper looks at how the field of journalism responds to two incursions in the form of feedback: quantitative Web analytics and qualitative reader comments. Each offers an opportunity for the field to adapt to incorporate it—that is, turn heteronomous input into autonomous doxa—or to resist it. Based on an ethnography of eight digital newsrooms, it looks at when the voice of the people is accepted as legitimate input and internalised, and when it is resisted as illegitimate and kept external. The implications for further theorising on the relationship between adjacent fields, as well as autonomous and heteronomous aspects of field theory, are discussed.