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.
