Audience metrics as disruptive innovation: Analysing emotional work of Finnish journalism professionals

Introducing web analytics or “audience metrics” in newsrooms has created a situation wherein news professionals must adopt these mechanisms as a meaningful part of their work. Recent research by Christin and Petre (2020) shows that journalists have indeed accepted metrics and to a large degree have “made peace” with them. With this article, we paint a nuanced picture of this peace process by discussing the disruptive nature of audience metrics as a technological innovation and the emotional work demanded by it.

Digital transformation in journalism is often discussed in terms of crisis and disruption (Steensen & Westlund, 2021). Such disruption reaches almost every aspect of the news media, from gathering the news, through telling the stories and delivering the news, to engaging the public, not to mention funding the entire enterprise (Pavlik, 2021). One can regard disruption in journalism as an uneasy long-term condition, to which news organisations have been trying to adapt via regular enhancements to their innovation.

The disruption discourse hence often gets coupled with a discourse of innovation (Steensen & Westlund, 2021). In the news-media context, “innovation” refers to finding new, useful, different, or creative ways of doing things and solving problems to increase the news organisation's viability (García-Avilés et al., 2019). The logic, borrowed primarily from the world of business and management, is that in a competitive situation, a newcomer to the field may disrupt the market by offering improved services or products, thereby pushing existing businesses to adapt to the dramatically altered circumstances by accelerating their own innovation (Christensen et al., 2012, 2015).

Bossio and Nelson (2021) characterised digital innovation in newsrooms as having led to celebration intermingled with a sense of failure: While the idea that innovation promises the salvation of journalism has persisted, it has also occasioned wry amusement when “the inevitable jargon of innovation does not equate to real change or real engagement with audiences” (Bossio & Nelson, 2021: 1377). Because most news organisations either have not been nimble enough or have placed excessive focus on flashy new technology (Possetti, 2018), the field of journalism has found itself in a constant struggle with innovation (Ferrucci & Perreault, 2021; Steensen & Westlund, 2021).

Journalism's rocky relationship with both disruption and innovation is complicated by the fact that, naturally enough, news organisations have approached not just business consultants but also technology companies for help in managing digital transformation (Chua & Duffy, 2019). This has brought with it a framework from the technology culture. Namely, for technologists, disruption is a positive outcome of the activities with technology, so disruption is something that is actively pursued (Russell, 2019; Svensson, 2021). For example, Silicon Valley experts attempt to disrupt industries such as journalism deliberately, even aggressively, because this spurs them toward better solutions and ground-breaking innovation (Russell, 2019). In this context, a programmer is a disrupter who stirs up the field but who can also solve the problems caused by this (Svensson, 2021).

From this techno-economic framing, there emerges a cyclical interpretation wherein disruption leads to innovation that, in turn, leads to disruption, and so on. This results in the regarding of many innovations as disruptive by their very nature: They dramatically alter and shape the fabric of the field they are developed for or used in. Such inventions are conceptualised as disruptive innovations (Bower & Christensen, 1995; Pavlik, 2021; Svensson, 2021). Ferrucci and Perreault (2021) stated that computers, editing software, and mobile devices can be considered disruptive innovations in the recent history of journalism. With this article, we argue that audience metrics – journalism's use of web analytics for measuring online audience activity – is a digital tool that can be analysed as a disruptive innovation.

Web analytics was established not for journalism but for digital marketing; however, side effects of this innovation created a new market, where analytics companies could sell their services to newsrooms to support editorial decisions (Petre, 2018; Tandoc, 2019). News organisations in the Nordics and elsewhere have established partnerships with such companies with aims of understanding and gaining a foothold among digital news audiences (Andreassen et al., 2021; Heikkilä, 2022).

Ever since their inception in the early 2000s, audience metrics in journalism have maintained an association with both the innovation and the disruption discourses. For many practitioners, the metrics represent a new, game-changing digital tool for rethinking how news professionals can connect to their audiences and those audiences’ presumed needs and interests (Costera Meijer, 2020). Yet, researchers have simultaneously noted that the stress on metrics has disrupted journalistic practice by bringing in the technology realm's logic, to the extent of realigning physical spaces in newsrooms to accommodate dashboard screens (Tandoc, 2019) and generating unanswered ethics questions about the right to monitor readers in a fashion akin to surveillance (Heikkilä, 2022). Hence, news professionals have been drawn into a sensitive process of sense-making surrounding the significance of metrics. This sense-making is here examined through the analytical lens of emotional work, which refers to the ways in which professionals must engage with emotions and manage them to fulfil work expectations (Pantti & Wahl-Jorgensen, 2021).

In this article, we focus on Finland, and we address two research questions: 1) What is the Finnish news professionals’ emotional work about metrics directed at? 2) What is the relationship between this emotional work and the cycle of disruption and innovation?

Over the years, journalists’ reactions to audience metrics have changed quite dramatically. In the early 2000s, journalists across Europe who contemplated the then-nascent technology seemed to display “markedly weak interest in tracking usage of their sites, or employing the results to remodel their practices, or site design” (MacGregor, 2007: 283). In the early 2010s, metrics were clearly starting to affect news-selection routines and, through this, were creating a sense of professional struggle and even resistance to metrics among journalists (Welbers et al., 2016). Just a few years later, however, Cherubini and Nielsen (2016) noted that journalists’ general response to algorithmic audience analysis had shifted from resistance to curiosity and interest, and Belair-Gagnon (2019) soon concluded that analytics culture had come to permeate news organisations’ everyday work practices and success assessments.

It seems that journalists are currently in the process of trying to “make peace with metrics” (Christin & Petre, 2020). Citing evidence from French and American newsrooms, Christin and Petre argued that this is happening via five distinct strategies focused on the relationship between journalism and business: 1) journalists draw moral lines between “good” and “bad” metrics, 2) journalists focus on moments at which metrics serve both traffic-related and journalistic goals, 3) news organisations are domesticating metrics via in-house analytics teams, 4) the organisations frame metrics as a source of knowledge about the public rather than the customer, and 5) journalists have started to see metrics as a resource for subsidies that enable conducting high-quality journalism by means of the income supplied by high traffic. Through these strategies, journalists downplay or justify the economic discourse underpinning metrics, which permits them to accept analytics without sacrificing their sense of professional integrity.

Nonetheless, Christin and Petre emphasised that the process of peace-making is not yet finished. In their study, this is exemplified by a sixth strategy – “over-spelling” – which occurred when “the profit-generating potential of journalists’ activities was plainly spelled out and incentivized through metrics for its own sake” (Christin & Petre, 2020: 145). Here, the association between metrics and money was so plain that editorial staff grew alienated to the point of resigning.

We posit that, in addition to such conflicts related to blunt business goals, there is another reason for the peace-making process being incomplete: The programmers and data experts who develop the analytics tools are embedded in a tech culture that values continuous disruption. The technological innovation that is supposed to assist in surviving amid a disrupted market is at the same time itself a source of disruption, in that it transforms the field dramatically (Bower & Christensen, 1995; Pavlik, 2021; Svensson, 2021).

We suggest, then, that the nature of audience metrics as a disruptive innovation is among the factors that render peace-making a sensitive process in Finnish journalism culture. Teasing apart this delicate process here, we focus primarily on newsroom managers, but we also present findings from the open-ended survey responses from journalists at Finland's biggest daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat (HS).

From the outset, the informants revealed strong and highly contrasting emotional reactions to metrics. These reactions point to fragility of the peace that journalists in Finland are making with metrics. At its best, it is negative rather than positive peace – that is, absence of explicit conflict as opposed to the presence of structures that create and sustain a peaceful environment (Galtung & Fischer, 2013). In the discussion that follows, we analyse the process by which professionals try to render audience metrics meaningful and manageable in news journalism work in Finland.

By focusing on Finland, we can contribute to knowledge about the role of metrics in journalism cultures that used to be socially and economically stable but where newspapers, especially, have faced steady decline in circulation (Hellman, 2021). The sense of competition, profit-making pressures, as well as technological requirements of the work have increased in the past decade in Finland (Väliverronen et al., 2016). The journalistic culture in Finland, like in other Nordic countries, is still framed by the traditions of the welfare state and democratic corporatism, but is in transition, due to decreases in public subsidies and regulation (Ahva et al., 2017; Syvertsen et al., 2014). However, the Finnish public's trust in journalism has remained relatively high, which has also rendered possible the development of the paywall model: The proportion of people paying for online news is higher than average in the Nordic countries (Newman et al., 2022). In terms of analytics development, Finland represents a region (with other Nordic countries) where, along with the US, metrics have been developed more vigorously than in the other parts of the world (Interview with a data specialist and section head at a large, international data company, 31 March 2021). It is in this setting where we study journalism professionals’ emotional reactions to audience metrics.

The role of emotion has been subject to considerable discussion in journalism studies over the past decade (see Peters, 2011; Richards & Rees, 2011), to the point that Wahl-Jorgensen (2020) identified an emotional turn in journalism studies. This phenomenon has drawn greater academic attention to the previously neglected role of emotion in the production, representation, and reception of journalism. Said turn in journalism studies is one manifestation of the humanities’ and social sciences’ broader-based interest in affect and affectivity, with the accompanying varied and debated conceptual terrain.

We find merit in applying Wahl-Jorgensen's (2020) distinction between the concepts of affect and emotion: Whereas affect is the immediate bodily sensation and a sense of intensity, emotion is an interpretation of the bodily affect. We restrict our analysis to the latter, mindful that, as Wahl-Jorgensen noted, emotion is a relational interpretation and therefore something that can be verbally expressed, narrativised, and circulated. Emotions bring affective experiences into social context. Sara Ahmed (2004) is among the scholars who have spoken against seeing emotions as personal experiences only. She has argued that emotions do not belong merely to individuals or even come from within and then move outward from the individual. Rather, emotions circulate and hence “do things, and they align individuals with communities [emphasis original]” (Ahmed, 2004: 119).

One such doing is manifested as emotional work (Pantti & Wahl-Jorgensen, 2021; cf. Hochschild, 1983, who uses the term emotional labour). This notion refers to a way of engaging with emotions and managing them in order to comply with the profession's and organisation's work expectations (Pantti & Wahl-Jorgensen, 2021). For example, professionals in newsrooms carry out emotional work when they appropriate digital tools for their everyday work (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020). For instance, regarding audience metrics, Petre (2021) has noted that journalists do not always understand what the numbers mean, why one article performs better than another, or how they should adjust their practices to master the metrics, which has caused them insecurity about their own professional expertise. Such moments require journalists to process their uncertainties emotionally. Indeed, Cohen (2019) has indicated how measurability brought about by metrics causes digital journalists to oscillate between excitement and anxiety. Even analytics provider Chartbeat has noticed that metrics evoke emotions, especially negative ones (Petre, 2021): The company has tried to manage journalists’ feelings by carrying out emotional work on its part by creating a positive brand identity that appears in their workers’ tone of voice and on their dashboard designs.

Looking at our material through the lens of emotional work enables us to identify the key issues or contradictions (Lünenborg & Medeiros, 2021) that journalists need to work through as they deal with audience metrics. As we zoom in on these, we can also discuss what exactly emotions do to the problematic process of audience metrics’ assimilation in Finnish newsrooms. Do emotions help to accept or resist metrics? In our analysis, we have sought inspiration from previous studies on emotional work in media and journalism (Siapera, 2019; Soronen, 2018) to further identify the relationships (e.g., with co-workers or audiences), temporal dimensions (e.g., future work opportunities), and objects (e.g., tools or conceptualisations) that emotional work is directed at in the case of metrics. This emotional work, in turn, may have bearing for other journalistic practices and the building of social order in newsrooms (Lünenborg & Medeiros, 2021; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020). Hence, we find emotion as a valuable methodological concept for the study of the process by which journalists try to make peace with metrics as a form of disruptive innovation.

Our empirical work focused on the perceptions among so-called metrics forerunners in the journalistic culture of Finland. We used two main datasets. Our primary dataset comes from nine semistructured interviews with news managers, digital-domain specialists, and leaders of analytics teams working in Finnish news organisations. Two of them represented tabloid newspapers, one a broadcasting company, and the remaining six represented the main national and regional newspapers. Two of the interviewees were female, and seven were male. This dataset gave us knowledge of professionals who are responsible for buying and implementing the use of analytics in news organisations and who thus have a position of leadership in the organisation. As a professional group, managers have been identified as forerunners who receive the most training by external analytics companies and act as important internal influencers on how metrics should be used (Zamith et al., 2020).

This dataset comprises, in all, about 100 pages of transcribed interview material, which was collected between December 2020 and February 2021. Each interview lasted about 60 minutes, and the questions were organised under three main themes: 1) the managers’ and their newsrooms’ data-related work practices, 2) the role of audience metrics in Finnish news outlets more generally, and 3) the balance between in-house and outsourced data analysis in their companies.

Our secondary dataset consists of the qualitative responses to an online survey intended for the editorial staff of HS (N = 39). With this dataset, we captured the experiences of journalism professionals from a newsroom that has a particularly strong and unique position in the Finnish media landscape: HS is the largest-circulation subscription-based newspaper in the country and, in fact, the entire Nordic region. Measured by page-views as well as reach, its online services are the most viewed among paywalled news outlets in Finland (Media Metrics Finland, 2023). Being part of Sanoma, Finland's largest newspaper group, HS has also been able to secure resources for digital innovation, a domain where large organisation size seems to be an advantage (Helsingin Sanomat, 2020). Due to these reasons, HS has gained professional weight as a digital forerunner in Finland, and it has been able to increase its digitally based income and dedicate in-house resources to analytics. This dataset thus provided us insight into the views of journalists who work in a newsroom that can be regarded as a metrics pioneer.

The survey was executed in February–March 2021. Almost two thirds (24) of the respondents were reporters and journalists, and the rest (15) worked in management positions in the HS editorial office. Due to the low response rate, with only 10 per cent of the roughly 400 journalists returning the questionnaire, we are not able to draw representative conclusions of HS as an organisation. Instead, we utilise the findings to illustrate experiences of different journalistic actors beyond the managers. Moreover, our analysis focuses on the open-ended responses because they featured vivid emotional expressions that could be analysed in tandem with the interviews. The open-ended questions of the survey pertained to themes such as 1) reasons to follow or not to follow metrics, 2) the effects of metrics on journalistic work, 3) the newsroom's feedback habits, and 4) the emotions evoked by analytics. The answers comprise about 15 pages of textual material.

On top of these two main datasets, we have used the transcripts from eight background interviews with third-party analytics providers working with Finnish news organisations as supportive material. This material offered contextual information illuminating how the practices of third-party analytics providers frame the work and experiences within journalistic organisations, but it was not analysed similarly in terms of emotions as the two main datasets. The companies were identified in the interviews with managers, and individual informants were sought via snowballing. This source of data consists of about 120 pages of transcripts from interviews with representatives of three Finnish and five international companies. The interviews were conducted between March and October 2021.

To invite earnest responses in the relatively small professional circles of the Finnish journalistic culture, anonymity was granted to all informants and their organisations in the qualitative interviews. Also, certain aspects of data analytics are sensitive for organisations as business secrets. In the Finnish context, HS is such a recognisable player that organisational anonymity was not considered to be necessary in relation to the survey. We obtained consent for the interviews after informing the participants about the details and purposes of the study.

Because the study was conducted amid pandemic-linked restrictions, we had to rely on remote interviews (via Zoom or MS Teams). Video recordings of the sessions allowed the interviewer (one of the authors) to note any non-verbal emotional cues. However, our detail-level analysis of the interviews relied on textual transcripts, which was in line with the textual survey responses.

We did not aim to compare the datasets but to trace shared emotional registers. Here, we focused on the verbal expressions of emotions (e.g., “I was annoyed”, which we interpreted as irritation) and on interviewees’ descriptions of emotionally intense moments (e.g., describing a moment when “all the data-related tasks were thrown at me”, which we interpreted as stress and irritation). So, we first analysed our material inductively by conducting qualitative content analysis on these direct and indirect references to emotions, and to what they were directed at.

In the next stage, we identified and focused on the most explicit emotions expressed in the manager interviews and in the responses in the open-ended items of the HS survey. We grouped the emotions into three main clusters: 1) relief, contentment, and confidence; 2) excitement, curiosity, and motivation; and 3) stress, worry, and irritation. Then we identified deductively (based on categorisations from previous research on media work and emotion), the objects (the main domain), relations (between people or practices), and temporal dimensions (the time frame) at which the emotional clusters were directed in the material. Lastly, we reflected on these clusters against the backdrop of the analytics-provider interviews. Next, we discuss what this emotional work tells us about metrics as a disruptive innovation.

We have delved into the role of audience metrics as a form of disruptive innovation requiring emotional work in Finnish newsrooms. It is noteworthy that the studied news professionals’ emotional work is generally oriented to journalistic practice and the affordances of the web analytics, and not to the empirical audience. Such emotional work moulds the local journalistic culture (Lünenborg & Medeiros, 2021) towards accepting and appreciating metrics rather than problematising them, even if certain doubts remain. Our findings, summarised in Table 1, are elaborated upon below.

Firstly, the sense of relief in the material is linked with the general digital transformation of the news industry. The Internet, blogging, and social media, for example, disrupted the long-lasting social and economic sustainability of the Finnish news media and resulted in losses of readership, market share, social status, and jobs. We argue that Finnish journalists have experienced this overall phenomenon so profoundly that audience metrics are welcomed, against a backdrop of trauma. Digitalisation's arrival turned audiences into unpredictable digital herds, but analytics offers a possibility of transforming them further into aggregates of consumers that can be managed algorithmically (Anderson, 2011). Finnish news professionals seem willing to forgive many restrictions and disturbances related to analytics in exchange for a sense of control – after so many years of uncontrollability. It seems that emotional work has been effectively and collectively carried out to ease this transition and to overcome the sense of uncertainty over the audience. But it is possible to see a hint of nostalgia for the pre-digital era in our results also: The current focus and the rhetorical power of subscription metrics might hark back to the days when journalism was a more stable and predictable social institution.

Secondly, another trend that is highlighted by our results involves the newsrooms’ manner of preparing for the next wave of analytics-related disruption. Emotional work is here first and foremost carried out by managers to stimulate their staff ahead of the coming wave. This seems connected to a finding of Zamith and colleagues (2020), where the norm formation regarding metrics appears to follow a top-down approach. Critical attention, according to managers, must be directed to technological capabilities: how the vast volumes of data are stored and arranged so as to be useful in the future. Our material indicates that if these matters are handled properly and with the aid of suitable innovations, exciting possibilities may be created for newsrooms. Such preparation requires ever more space and data power, however: data lakes, data warehouses, and cloud services, all coupled with expert knowledge of data, which is likely to entail reliance on external partners and tech giants. The recent mergers in the Finnish news business are very probably linked to anticipating a disruption–innovation cycle centred on data architecture that requires more resources. Only the biggest media corporations with the best economic footing can continue to domesticate audience metrics and enhance their in-house innovation and organisational learning. Indeed, our findings also indicate that metrics-related learning bolsters professional confidence and motivates the entire staff. But conditions must allow it; smaller newsrooms may have to wrestle with uncertainties longer – or merge with bigger organisations.

Thirdly, our results point out the still-unresolved relationship between data-led management and the profession's value of autonomy (both internal and external; see Örnebring et al., 2016). Emotional work in this register is about trying to find a balance between these requirements. For instance, independence from economic pressure constitutes a large part of autonomy, but today's application of analytics demands that journalists constantly consider the economic and competitive aspects of journalism. Even if focusing on subscriptions (rather than clicks) meshes well with Finnish journalists’ mindset and understanding of quality in journalism, the focus remains on economic measurements. It makes the commodified nature of a single article more explicit to the individual journalist (Chua & Duffy, 2019; see also Cohen, 2019). The monetary focus seems more acceptable when packaged in the form of subscription rather than page-view figures and advertisement impressions. At the same time, analytics makes newsrooms more dependent on the powerful tech companies. Although news managers recognise this dependency, they do not or cannot actively resist it in their daily work.

Our findings confirm the existence of a trend in which journalists are working toward being at peace with the use of metrics (Christin & Petre, 2020). Finnish news professionals – the forerunners – are willing to look with favour on metrics, because these tools bring with them a sense of control, along with instruments of learning and development, after an era of chaos. The positively inclined emotional work attests to this. At the same time, the negatively toned emotional work suggests that – even within work cultures and groups of professionals held up as forerunners in Finland – the peace treaty is fragile and provisional. The peace is best described as a negative one: There are few, if any, concrete confrontations, but underlying structural elements and the aggressiveness of the tech industry's embrace of disruption (Russell, 2019) do not support a lasting peace. In particular, the emotions around a sense of autonomy loss indicate that this peace with metrics is bound to remain negative, insofar as metrics stand in contradiction with a value central to the profession.

Limitations to our study are that our material does not allow us to analyse the journalists’ interpretations quantitively nor to draw direct comparisons between the managers and the managed. A general discrepancy is nonetheless evident between the leaders’ relatively enthusiastic and innovation-oriented perspectives and the stance of journalists at large. Moreover, the interviews with analytics providers indicate that they often side with managers – or the other way round. Media managers under pressure from business disruption find an ally in tech companies who promise to address the economic disruption with technical innovation. However, as they team up with technology companies, they forge an alliance with a culture that favours active disruption (Svensson, 2021). This seems to be culminating in a situation wherein the techno-economic coupling of disruption and innovation speeds up the very cycle that the newsroom managers are grappling with.

That said, newsrooms are working to find ways of managing disruptive innovations sustainably. For this, a balance must be struck between the techno-economic domain where “technology solutions can solve any crisis of journalism” (Russell, 2019: 644) and the journalistic domain that tries to uphold the public's trust (Heikkilä, 2022). Our material suggests that balancing elements might be found in the ways in which journalists exploit the innovation possibilities in core journalistic tasks but also in those efforts wherein the gaze is zoomed out from the intra-organisation landscape to encompass facets of extra-organisational power relations.

Our findings can be used as a reference point for further assessing the solidification of metrics into journalism cultures and media markets – such as in the Nordics, but also more broadly (see, e.g., Chua & Duffy, 2019, for the case of Singapore) – that utilise the paywall and subscription models. They may also help in future work of scrutinising the impact that the next wave of disruption featuring AI systems (Hao, 2018) will have on journalism, and the kind of emotional alleviation, stimulation, and balancing it requires.