“Squeezing humanity through a straw”: The long-term consequences of using metrics in journalism. [Here's C.W.
Anderson responding to the same subject Nikki Usher wrote about: the impact of audience data on how news organizations operate. Sort of a debate. —Josh] One way to think about the growing use of online metrics in newsrooms (a practice that has been going on forever but seems to have finally been noticed of late) is to think about it as part of a general democratization of journalism. Why SEO and audience tracking won’t kill journalism as we know it.
[I'm happy to introduce Nikki Usher, a new contributor here at the Lab.
Nikki is a Ph.D. candidate at USC Annenberg and, before academia, was a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere. Here she tackles the question of using metrics in journalism; later today, we'll have a different take on the same topic from C.W. Anderson. Some Newspapers Shift Coverage After Tracking Readers Online.