ABSTRACT
Web analytics has been understood as a mechanism to help news organizations increase traffic to ultimately improve revenues—an economic, more than a journalistic, pursuit. It was originally developed not specifically for journalism, but it is considered a basic tool in most online newsrooms to track and understand online audience behavior. A series of interviews with news managers in Sweden found that the impact of web analytics in their newsrooms is “heavily moderated by journalists and their news judgment”. Considering web analytics as the point where the various rules, practices, and motivations of journalists, news audiences, technologists, and advertisers intersect helps to identify key areas for understanding the implications for journalism. In journalism, web analytics and other audience information systems have disrupted the relationships between news workers and their audiences, between editorial and advertising, and between content and technology. Traditional ways of tracking, measuring, and conceiving of the news audience have been disrupted.
