Metrics and Editorial Mission: Who's Driving This Bus?

How to balance optimizing metrics and creating mission-driven content

How would it make you feel if I told you I wrote this article because I knew you were looking for one just like it? What if all of my content was tailored just so that it was designed for your interests and attention?

If you’re looking for quality journalism, unique story coverage, and a platform you can trust for original content, these questions may concern you, and they certainly concern the many writers and publishers of digital content.

Metrics are the various measurements that track the performance of a website, and they are essential to curating a successful online platform. If a website format or journalistic style isn’t connecting with audiences, metrics can help creators identify the lack of engagement and make positive change on their website.

But back to my previous questions—what if websites solely relied on metrics to produce more content that they knew would perform well, meaning (in theory) that you would like it?

Keep It Clean

No clear guidelines for balancing the use of metrics with a website’s editorial mission have been established, so individual journalists and publications are establishing their own standards for ethical journalism. For example, Caitlin Petre found that journalists at Gawker.com made their own guidelines, distinguishing between “clean” and “dirty” uses of metrics.

Petre details how journalists will work hard to create their own justifications and boundaries to help them incorporate metrics without sacrificing their professional standards.

“Some forms and uses of metrics are categorized as clean — meaning that they are seen as harnessing analytics while mitigating the threat to journalists’ status, autonomy, and integrity. Others are categorized as dirty or contaminating.”

You may be thinking, clean journalism sounds great, but what is so wrong with using metrics to give the people what they want? Who doesn’t love curated content?

And you make a good point, but if publications abuse the use of metrics (a.k.a. dirty metric usage—gross!), they risk sacrificing the quality of their content and the stability and longevity of their publication.

A Moment in the Spotlight

If you have ever taken a quiz to determine what type of cookie you are or which U.S. state you actually belong in, then you’re likely familiar with Buzzfeed. In the early to mid-2010s, Buzzfeed dominated internet culture by mining social media platforms for trending content and adopting a viral aesthetic—cute animal pictures, GIFs, long-form video content, and written content in a conversational style that is still organized by “LOL” and “WIN” section header buttons. Mia Sato of The Verge rightly describes this aesthetic as “the equivalent of having eyes nowhere and everywhere on the internet at once.”

When Buzzfeed seemed to have cracked the code for online success, the demand for viral content only became higher. Since viral content was attracting audiences and boosting metrics, they needed to have the most viral content to keep audiences on their site as opposed to the platforms they were packaging content from, like Tumblr and Reddit.

Once their content creation became a metrics-chasing game, the journalists were forced to focus on hitting quotas rather than creating quality content. Valued content creators at Buzzfeed left or were laid off as the company’s values changed, and Buzzfeed eventually lost not only the quality of their content but also the trust of their audience.

Emphasizing Quality

Metrics are essential to successful online platforms, but they cannot replace a publication’s editorial mission, unless a publication wishes to shine brightly for a moment to then later enter the void of outdated and empty content where Buzzfeed now lives. Online publications must learn to balance metrics and editorial mission in a way that works for them.

“If [journalists] ignore traffic data altogether, they risk being seen as foolishly obstinate, patronizing toward their audience, and behind the digital times — in effect guaranteeing their professional obsolescence and possibly facing managerial censure or even job loss. But if journalists rely on metrics too much, they risk corrupting their sense of professional integrity and autonomy, and potentially sullying their reputation,” says Petre.

Although social media has proven that there are content curation techniques that can keep us engaged for hours and clickbait has shown that we can be drawn to flashy things, the content behind the techniques and clickbait still must have some meat to it.

The worst thing a publication can do is to underestimate the intelligence and agency of their audience. We want good information and quality content, so if a publication only has flashy headlines or repackaged information, we will take our online interactions elsewhere.