The Audience-Oriented Editor

TLDR

The growing importance of audience metrics in editorial decision‑making has prompted the creation of new newsroom roles focused on navigating audience data. This paper investigates how these emerging audience‑oriented roles influence editorial choices and to what extent audience figures shape those decisions. The authors conducted 15 in‑depth interviews with engagement, social media, and audience editors from diverse media systems worldwide. The findings reveal that engagement is defined almost entirely by metrics, audience editors act as mediators between metric data and journalistic intuition, and there is a lack of cohesion in defining and operating these roles, thereby advancing the literature on metrics in journalism.

Abstract

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.