Datafication, Media and Democracy: Transformation of news work in datafied society

Project Information

DataMeDe

Grant agreement ID: 895273

DOI

10.3030/895273

Project closed

EC signature date 9 April 2020

Start date 14 October 2020

End date 13 October 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 214 158,72

EU contribution

€ 214 158,72

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITETET I BERGEN
Norway

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DataMeDe (Datafication, Media and Democracy: Transformation of news work in datafied society)

Reporting period: 2020-10-14 to 2022-10-13

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

DataMeDe project addresses the implications which the processes of datafication bring for society, by researching datafication of journalism as one of the most important pillars of democracy. Datafication, considered as a conversion of various life-processes into streams of data for further computer-based processing, is altering journalism in several respects. However, DataMeDe argues that exposure to the audience in form of analytics is the most transformative for news work and media organizational structures. For a long time, news work has been guided by professional standards, without much influence of audience feedback. Today, audience interaction with online news leaves a lot of data, which gets collected, transformed into metrics and analytics - audience becomes datafied. Ongoing research is showing that audience analytics gain more importance in deciding what is news, determining news selection, story structuring and presentation of information, newsroom and media organization structures, journalistic role orientations and media service to society. Most of these studies revolve around the central issue: whether audience datafication is driving journalism closer or further away to its normative ideals. There are two camps in considering this issue. At one hand, scholars are concerned that growing datafication leads journalism to content choices that serve more to attract than to inform audience, and fosters fabrication of clickbait news for lucrative reasons. On the other hand, audience datafication enthusiasts point out that audience analytics help establishing better connection between journalist and audience, providing wider, better targeted reach for content. Within journalism field, there are agents that share attitudes of both camps, often pulling in opposite directions and creating tensions in the field. Mostly executives see datafied audience as promising resource, favor innovations in tools and organizational structures, and foster newsroom culture which embraces datafication. Journalists feel that managers use audience data as disciplinary device, to standardize journalistic work, weakening professional standards and autonomy. Against this backdrop, main objective of DataMeDe is to deepen our understanding of journalism datafication, by looking into the journalism-audience relationship at four interrelated levels of news-work: 1) individual journalist, journalism practice 2) media organization, newsroom structures 3) inter-organizational, media industry 4) reception, audience level.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

DataMeDe objective to collect data at interrelated levels of news work was achieved by selecting diversified actors (journalists, editors, media managers, and data analysts) from most influential media organizations in Norway with different funding and regulatory statuses. The first phase of data collection included in-depth semi structured interviews, online observation of media work, and visits to media organizations. In the second phase, in-depth semi structured interviews with the highest ranked executives (CEOs) of the most successful media-tech companies from Norway were done along with desk research about companies that provide audience analytics to media. The insights about news uses were used to identify main differences between user experience and interpretations of common metrics.
All conducted interviews were analyzed using Nvivo software for qualitative data analysis. Findings of DataMeDe were disseminated for industry members in different ways, research briefs were sent to media organizations, events that gather scholars, various tech, and media workers from whole Norway in the Media City Bergen, such as Future Week, MediaFutures Annual Meeting, were used for that purpose. Also, seminar with data analysts from the most influential regional newspaper in Norway has been organized at the MediaFutures research center. DataMeDe findings were presented on international academic coreferences, two mid-scale (Media and Publics Conference, Roskilde University, and ECREA Journalism Studies 2022, University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht) and one smaller-scale international (Histories of Digital Journalism 2022, University of Technology and Economics, Budapest).
The paper summarizing main findings for media industry members and research community has been published (http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4245771) as well as paper that argues for introducing (data)infrastructural literacy in the curricula of journalism education (http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4252628). To make data available for further use, the data set was created in the Institutional repository Dataverse.no (https://doi.org/10.18710/GR2REB). To foster engagement of scholars to rethink journalism transformation from datafication perspective the call for papers for the special issue of the Media Studies and Applied Ethics - Datafication of Journalism, has been launched.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The main objective of DataMede is to contribute to the knowledge about comprehension and utilization of datafied audience in relation to different professional roles and organizational settings, fitted into the broader context of the media industry. Following such objective, analysis of data collected at different levels of news work has provided novel insights. Foremost, by analyzing differences in comprehension and utilization of audience analytics and metrics between journalists, editors, and media managers, the role of data analysts as facilitators in comprehending and using audience analytics has been identified. The role of data analysts in defining and connecting strategic goals (commercial interests) with selected metrics that guide editorial work, further scaled down to partly “black-boxed” meta-metric for journalists, has been overlooked in the literature so far. Therefore, DataMeDe project contributes to understanding journalism datafication by providing insight into facilitative role of data analysts in making audience analytics usable(constructed) for other members of media organizations.
Main contribution of DataMeDe analysis from the third, inter-organizational level is in disentangling the complexity of infrastructures for audience datafication, by mapping out externally and internally developed parts of infrastructures to expand our knowledge about the use of those infrastructures across organizations. There is little scholarship on how newsroom analytics tools are produced, and most of the existing knowledge comes from researching actors in external web analytics companies. DataMeDe provides novel perspective by approaching audience datafication from inside, as internally appropriated system of external and internal tools, fitted to the editorial mission and financial/technical capacities of the organization.
In the broader perspective, DataMeDe findings should be understood in the context of Norwegian media system relatively ‘immune’ to commercialization. Norway represents the Democratic Corporatist media system with strong public service broadcasting, local and national newspapers with egalitarian readership, highest subscription to online news in Europe, viable media market complemented by the proactive state intervention governed by arm’s-length principles. Those characteristics create conditions for high levels of journalism professionalism, strong orientation of media towards serving the wellbeing of citizens and thereby reflect on the findings about journalism datafication.

Poster of DataMeDe