Editors and publishers often face ethical dilemmas when using story reviews to measure their work. But, are those doubts justified? Here, editors and publishers debate the principles of story analysis and subscription change. What can we learn from this discussion? Let’s examine the question together. The Backstory: The Ethics of Story Analytics
Luis Cruz: Welcome to “San Diego News Fix: The Backstory.” Every week on this podcast we answer important questions about the rules of journalism and give you a behind-the-scenes look at our industry and what’s happening in our newsroom.
This week we discuss the ethics of story reviews and whether journalists should be concerned about subscription change. Joining me today to discuss this topic are U-T public relations specialist Bella Ross, Pacific and community guidance editor Abby Hamblin, government editor and watchdog Sam Schulz, executive editor Lora Cicalo, and we start with editor and publisher Jeff Light.
Jeff Light: Thank you, Luis. I think this is a very interesting topic, and let me give a little background for the audience about this concept of digital analytics, which really, I think, grows out of the field of e-commerce, which which is very important in the digital world. In fact, here at the Union-Tribune, as in media outlets large and small, we closely track – through technology – how many people have read our stories, whether those readers have received how the story, how much time they spent on the story, what ZIP they came from, whether they continued to read the second story or the third story, whether they subscribed, whether they went through the subscription payment process and they drop subscriptions, all the things you can think of Amazon.com to do or whatever. another business that sells something online.
So, this information age, I think like everything else today, has had some interesting effects – good and bad – and as journalists, on the other hand, our eyes are open to the idea that some of our stories are better read than others. And that seems to be very important news, because writing stories that no one is interested in or that no one reads would be a waste of our time and resources and our social responsibility. On the other hand, writing stories to make sales, I think, is a problem, because as journalists, we should not be concerned in any way with selfishness. We should be more concerned about the public interest. So, this idea that journalists are trying to make a sale – to serve the customer – is a little different than the spirit of journalism that founded our company.
So, there’s a lot to talk about, and, of course, I want to start with Lora Cicalo, our managing editor and someone who spends a lot of time thinking and teaching the rules. of media ethics. Lora, you are always present in all our discussions about analytics every day. Tell me what you think about all this.
Lora Cicalo: According to you, I think analytics can tell us a lot. They can tell us who’s reading, within certain categories, and how fast people are reading, , especially in pursuit of a large amount of traffic. Our role as journalists is to pursue the truth and report it without fear or favour, and that doesn’t necessarily equate to traffic numbers. I think too much emphasis on analytics can cause a lot of confusion. I see that especially when journalists try to dig into cause and effect and try to explain what might make a story work so well in terms of ranking or getting traffic and many eyes. It is very difficult to discern that cause and effect, and certainly very difficult to discern accurately. And I think sometimes it can mislead people because there can be a sense that they understand cause and effect, “Oh, we need to do more here because it’s causing traffic.” But our understanding of cause and effect is really very limited.
Sometimes it seems obvious why the story has so many eyes and sometimes it seems very difficult to understand. But our role as journalists is not to focus on those numbers. As you said, we want to serve the community, and one way to serve the community is if we write things that have meaning and meaning. There are many ways to measure that besides online analytics.
Jeff Light: Yes, interesting. However, of course, the risk is that we will have our heads in the sand, right? We’ll always write about things that interest us, no matter what kind of brand comes our way. So I think it’s hard to balance.
Lora Cicalo: Yes, although I would argue that future shows should be more. If we do our job right, we are connected to the community in many ways, and we don’t just look at the analytics of our online activity to see if we are meeting the needs of the community or not.
Jeff Light: Let’s turn to Sam Schulz. Sam, you have a very successful career in digital media and are well versed in this part of the industry. Tell me a little about how you’ve used analytics in the different companies you’ve worked for and your thoughts on some of this.
Sam Schulz: I think the last point that Lora made is important – that analytics can be very important to help measure how our media is connecting with readers and what they’re doing and how. what do they do with that. But it’s really just one tool at that. And that’s something I think I’ve seen a lot in the newspaper world in the last few years. As we see, for example, that some of our favorite analytics are no longer reliable, I think there is an appeal to analytics in particular as this approach to measure the commitment that readers have to our work because it seems so good, neat, hard number. But sometimes, as we’ve learned, those numbers aren’t that hard or neat, and need to be balanced with direct feedback from readers — whether it’s through qualitative research. through research or interviews with readers. and the communities that we want to be our readers, and also with the opinions that our reporters request from their readers every day and their reporting. That along with those analytics, I think that’s going to be really important.
It is one area that, especially in my digital work, I found newspapers to be very important because you have a direct connection with your readers and the opportunity to ask them every day what is important. Does this story relate to you? What are the unanswered questions that we can answer to give you more important information in your life?
Jeff Leseli: Yeah, you know, in newspaper reviews in particular, I feel like what we’re doing is very close to traditional performance advertising, right? So, in a group of newspapers you would try different headlines for the same article: “Mar-a-Lago attacked” or “FBI raids Trump’s house” – which one works better? It’s interesting to me because on the one hand, you can find a real difference in that kind of experiment, but then I end up feeling like “Is that what journalists should think about?” We talk about the topics of our stories in the same way: How can we find topics that work? And I think I’m of two minds about it. I’m not sure how much we’re advancing our ability to communicate clearly and create impactful work on this kind of scale, where we can see a response. Sometimes I feel that we focus on these peripheral issues, when in fact the heart of the matter is our legitimacy in society and the quality of our work. I’m not sure there’s a question there, Sam, but what do you think about those things.
Sam Schulz: When it comes to things like headline decisions, I’m always clear with journalists that it’s my job, and I think it’s good that journalists get some of this information so they can help. forgive me responsibility. They can say, “Hey, this story I wrote is in a very popular topic among our subscribers, maybe it wasn’t a great topic and the story seems incomplete.” That helps me know so I can help connect their writing with our readers.
I think sometimes there’s a risk of realizing, “Well, a lot of these stories aren’t getting a lot of traffic. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing them.” Those are the kinds of big decisions about that content, to of you, which is one of the potential pitfalls. And, of course, different reporters cover different beats — these aren’t apples-to-apples comparisons, of course. Man a pop culture geek will visit their stories more, perhaps, than someone who talks about arcane power strategy. That’s to be expected, and that doesn’t make the latter any less important. But I think being able to increase how those stories connect with their audience is where analytics help.
Jeff Light: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. We were talking a little bit before we started here about what is the job of a journalist and what is the job of a story. I am not sure that I am convinced that the work of each story should be as big as possible. Because I think that if we follow that path, we will lean towards famous people; we would tend to the type of the largest type that is similar. But the question is, is our role as a media organization really done that way? Aren’t there elements of what we do – taken together – that create the value of our report?
That’s something, Bella, you were talking about a while before we started. Your team – the Opinion team – covers a wide range of topics and works with many social voices on issues large and small. How do you think about analytics?
Bella Ross: We in the Opinion section generally run articles – which will be written by members of the public versus journalists – and editorials, and the editorial board focuses on small and large issues. And I think that for us, when you do an essay written by a member of the public, more often than not, it’s not going to do that with a great report from one of our Union-Tribune reporters. But that (conversation) can be very important for social work. The way newspapers normally work is to tell stories about people, and in this case, we are able to let them tell their story. So, it’s not only important to that person, but it can be important to their network of people to see themselves represented in the newspaper, and I think that can be huge for building trust. But, it won’t always translate to the biggest numbers.
The way I think about it is not to look at bad performance as something we have to stop doing – like if a story doesn’t get a lot of numbers, then we can’t do that story anymore – but more, how can we improve on that? I see them as opportunities. For example, we gave a lot of talks about the Arab American Film Festival, and it was very important to the Arab American community, but it wasn’t something that would get a lot of attention. And, of course, our goal with that is not to get everyone in San Diego County to read those stories; it’s more for that specific community, but it could also be an indication that maybe we should be doing more work with that community so that they know that our newspaper is a source of stories about things related to see. Perhaps the work has not gone far enough to the point where that relationship is established.
SEO and everything that falls into that, because we also need to make sure that the people who the stories are most important to can find them. So, headlines and all those things are still very important, and there are always ways we can frame a story differently to make sure it reaches the intended audience.
Jeff Light: Yes, a very good point or at least it makes sense to me what you just said: Sometimes the bottom line in the story doesn’t mean to stop doing it, it means that we have to do it more. So, a glib statistical analysis does not really guide us in the right direction. I think that is a very good point.
Okay, I want to turn to Abby. Abby, you’ve been really good at using all kinds of analytics to help figure out what people are interested in, what people are talking about, what questions they have – which I think is a great way to to view this type of data. I just thought maybe you could tell us about your process.
Abby Hamblin: I would agree with what has already been said about the diversity of input and feedback. Obviously you need to be in your communities talking to people, you need to get feedback in a lot more ways than a digital survey. But I can add – to talk about whether journalists should pay attention to analytics – many newsrooms have special people who focus on that full time and do a kind of training and educational work to help guide decisions about packaging and delivery. that some journalists don’t have to think about it too much. But I think this discussion really needs to focus on the digital landscape and the reality we are in as a newspaper.
If you’re using analytics to determine whether or not to cover something, that’s probably not the way to go. But if you’re using analytics to figure out how you should cover something or how you should deliver it, I think that’s a big difference. If we find that there is a big crowd on Instagram, maybe we should post the content there. If this community is interested in this story in the newspapers, that tells you something about the news coverage. And, you know, all these things change all the time. More people read their news on their phones than on their computers. I think that’s huge for us. So you have to think about the ways in which you manage the content.
I always try to talk to people about this because I think the word “clickbait” is used in a sloppy way. I used to work as an audience discussion editor, and I always told people that my job was to figure out how we deliver the news. People have a lot of competition for their attention on their phones in the digital space, and if they’re looking for something they can read in three minutes or less, can we find them? Many people prefer their news reports to their Alexa or Google Home speakers. That’s just a big part of the media industry right now, and it’s just a part of digital reality.
I’ll just add that I think analytics are very important in terms of how you deliver content and how you package it and what you can learn about the user experience. How do people like to read their news? Do people like it in print or on their phones? All of those things are part of the analytics story.
Jeff Light: Yes, well said. I feel like this conversation is kind of an offshoot of a previous conversation we had on this podcast, about pay for journalism – the ethics of the whole business side of enabling journalism in the community. This is an interesting point in this conversation. Thank you all for your thoughts on this topic.
Sources :
