ABSTRACT
A systematic way to understand how web analytics is used in day-to-day journalism is to examine how it figures in each of the different stages of news construction, from accessing information to selection and filtering, processing and editing, distribution, and interpretation. Web analytics also affects how news managers make sense of their audiences. Through web analytics, journalists get some clues to their readers’ reading habits, such as how they encounter news articles, how they consume news, and what time of the day they usually read news, among others. Interviews with American journalists from news organizations with different levels of market orientation also found that while in weakly market-oriented newsrooms, web analytics data is mostly used to reorganize the website, in strongly market-oriented newsrooms, “more editorial decisions about what to cover were made based on these data”. For individual journalists, the reasons for using web analytics can vary.
