As news organizations struggle to overcome losses in revenue and relevance, academics and professionals have pinned their hopes for salvation on increasing ‘audience engagement’. Yet few agree on ...what audience engagement means, why it will make journalism more successful, or what ‘success’ in journalism should even look like. This article uses Williams and Delli Carpini’s ‘media regimes’ as a theoretical framework to argue that studying the current open-arms approach to the news audience – and the ambiguity surrounding it – is vital to understanding journalism’s transition from one rapidly disappearing model to one that is yet to fully emerge. In doing so, it offers a definition of audience engagement that synthesizes prior literature and contributes an important distinction between reception-oriented and production-oriented engagement. It concludes with a call for more research into audience engagement efforts to better understand what journalism is and what it might become.
Digital trace data from giant platforms are gaining ground in the study of human behavior. This trend accompanies contestations regarding representativeness, privacy, access, and commercial origin. ...Complementing existing discussions and focusing on knowledge production, we draw attention to the different measurement regimes within passively captured behavioral logs from industries. Taking an institutional perspective on measurement as a management technology, we compare platforms with third-party audience measurement firms. Whereas the latter measure to provide “currency” for a multi-sided advertising market, the former measure internally for their own administrative purposes (i.e. prescribing behavior through design). We demonstrate the platform giants’ two-fold enclosure of first the user ecology and subsequently the previously open market for user attention. With platform trace data serving as a lifeline for scholarly research, platform episteme extends itself to enclose knowledge production. We conclude by suggesting ways in which academic quantitative social sciences may resist these platform enclosures.
Newspapers' democratic functions have not been fully assumed by the media capturing the revenues newspapers used to enjoy. It is, therefore, important to understand the determinants of newspaper use. ...Earlier studies found age to be the principal determinant, but did not account for newspapers' online editions. This article investigates to what extent digital distribution has disrupted previously observed cohort effects, bringing younger audiences back to newspaper content. The annual time spent with UK newspapers by their younger, middle-aged, and older British audiences was calculated for 1999/2000-before, or just after, newspapers started to go online-and for 2016, when digital distribution had come of age. The results show (1) the time spent with newspaper brands fell by 40 per cent, even as online platforms made access easier and cheaper; (2) the proportional decrease in time spent was greatest for the youngest age group and smallest for the oldest; and (3) there are important variations between individual newspaper brands, a result, we propose, of differences in their multiplatform strategies. Digital distribution has, therefore, had little impact on previously observed cohort effects but has enabled changes in media use that have shaped the attention given to newspapers and will continue to do so.
This article combines data from the British National Readership Survey, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, and comScore to calculate how much audience attention newspapers' print, personal computer ...(PC), and mobile platforms attract. The results show that, of the time spent with 11 UK national newspaper brands by their British audiences, 88.5 per cent still comes via their print editions, 7.49 per cent via mobiles, and just 4 per cent via PCs. The study reveals that the "share of consumption" of UK national newspaper brands (when measured by time spent) is less evenly distributed than commonly understood, conforming better to a logarithmic pattern than a linear one, and that a single brand-The Mail-has close to a 30 per cent market share. Such data should inform debates on, and the regulation of, media plurality. For publishers, this research calls into question the transition from print to online, showing how "dead-tree" editions are their most important platform. However, the circulation of print editions is in steep decline and newspapers' fortunes are falling almost as steeply. Unless the qualities that make newsprint so much more engaging than online journalism can be harnessed to propel a reading resurgence, newspapers' decline will continue, with important social, cultural, and political consequences.
This article considers the role of techniques of measurement and quantification, or ‘commensuration’, within the videogame industry. We argue that commensuration is performed as a discursive ...technique by institutional actors in the videogame industry to shape the form of, and ultimately derive value from, videogame markets – doing so by influencing collectively held perceptions concerning public policy and financial investment. This article draws on two case studies. First, the use of commensuration techniques by the Entertainment Software Association in lobbying the US government on behalf of large publishers, hardware manufacturers and videogame holding companies within the videogame industry. Second, the use of metrics and enumeration by videogame software companies in their financial reporting to craft narratives of user scale, engagement and ultimately value, particularly as it relates to articulating the value of their data-driven advertising services.
The past three decades have seen rapid development in the field of audience measurements in media companies. From once relying on measures of exposure such as circulation numbers and readership, ...technological developments have made present day media companies and journalists capable of understanding audience preferences in new and advanced ways. As a result, journalists are often strongly encouraged to take audience preferences into account when selecting and prioritizing journalistic content. This study uses participant observation to examine the process of implementing an audience analytics strategy for the digital newsrooms of a Danish regional daily and its sister publications. It focuses on the process of operationalizing and negotiating editorial and commercial goals through quantitative measures and discusses which news values are reflected in the chosen combination of web metrics made visible to the journalists on newsroom dashboards and in daily performance emails. The study suggests that "expected reception" should be included as a news value significant to journalism in the digital age.
Twenty years into US newspapers' online ventures, many are stuck between a shrinking market for their print product and an unsuccessful experiment with digital offerings. Since readership is the ...foundation for subscription and advertising revenue, this study, through a longitudinal analysis of readership data (2007, 2011, and 2015) of 51 US newspapers, provides an up-to-date review on these newspapers' online and print readership. Results indicated that the (supposedly dying) print product still reaches far more readers than the (supposedly promising) digital product in these newspapers' home markets, and this holds true across all age groups. In addition, these major newspapers' online readership has shown little or no growth since 2007, and more than a half of them have seen a decline since 2011. The online edition contributes a relatively small number of online-only users to the combined readership in these newspapers' home markets. These findings raise questions about US newspapers' technology-driven strategy and call for a critical re-examination of unchecked assumptions about the future of newspapers.
Resumen Tras estudiar los sistemas de medición de la audiencia televisiva en diferentes países, se reflexiona sobre los desafíos de la audimetría en el escenario mediático actual ante la llegada de ...nuevos competidores como las OTT. Los resultados demuestran que se está haciendo un esfuerzo por adaptarse a esos cambios, pero la audimetría aún no refleja el consumo real al dejar al margen a nuevos e importantes actores como Netflix.
Measuring the small in the digital landscape Sabaté, Joan; Micó, Josep Lluís
Catalan journal of communication & cultural studies,
04/2019, Letnik:
11, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In Catalonia, the smaller media publishing in the Catalan language - usually calling themselves proximity media instead of local media - is a significant and particularly dynamic sector of the media ...industry's environment. In a constant struggle to be visible against
the backdrop of the state-focused Spanish media measurement systems, different approaches have been tested to portray a more accurate picture of the importance of these media, to increase their advertising revenue and also to assess the impact of Catalonian media and culture. This article
analyses the effect produced in the audiences of the local media integrated in the Associació de Mitjans d'Informació i Comunicació (Association of Information and Communication Media) by the changes observed in the Communication and Culture Barometer published by
the Communication and Culture Audiences Foundation (FUNDACC). The objective of this article is to delineate the challenges that these media have to face to be market-significant from an audience measurement standpoint and how the media measurement institutions are a key player in this process.
Amidst the financial crisis affecting UK newspapers, one area of optimism is their online overseas audiences. These foreign visitors often outnumber their domestic equivalents, and some newspapers ...have made the ‘long-distance’ market a key component of their commercial strategies. Overseas news audiences are, however, under-researched, an omission this study aims to help remedy via an investigation into the audiences for 7 UK newspaper brands (and a public-service broadcaster) across 10 countries using data from a leading source of Internet audience measurement, Comscore. The study uses an innovative, multidimensional model (derived from work by Zheng et al.) to analyse audience engagement across the dimensions of visibility, popularity, depth, loyalty and stickiness. The results reveal that there are significant differences in how audiences behave from country to country, dependent on language and culture. The study has implications for how news organizations serve their overseas audiences and suggests new directions for research into audiences for globalized online journalism.
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