Beyond the cult of numbers: We need a more sophisticated approach to social media metrics for editorial decision-making
Axel Bruns · QUT ePrints (Queensland University of Technology) · 2017
As veteran ABC journalist Chris Uhlmann’s post-G20 rant about the U.S. President’s inability to act as the leader of the free world went viral around the world in early July, social media monitoring alarms would have sounded at ABC News Online: It’s not every day that even Harry Potter author JK Rowling lends a hand in promoting your content. We know about the global echo to Uhlmann’s comments in good part because monitoring of the social media impact of news articles is now widespread practice in the industry. You don’t need to be BuzzFeed, whose fundamental business model has been built around crafting viral content, to be interested in measuring the return on investment of your journalists’ time; almost all news outlets now engage in such monitoring at least to some extent, drawing on a broad range of in-house and external solutions. One concern that has been raised in response, of course, is that this will see the skewing of news towards increasingly bland, popular content and away from critical material that engages meaningfully with the substantial issues of the day — a buzzfeedisation of mainstream news, while Buzzfeed itself has begun to invest in producing more serious journalistic coverage.