ABSTRACT
Web analytics firms market their products to two distinct—although in smaller newsrooms they might be overlapping—groups. The buyer group, or those with the authority to allocate organizational resources to subscribing to analytics service, such as business managers; and the user group, or those who will be using the analytics platform on a daily basis, such as online editors. Audience measurement in journalism was originally intended for news organizations’ business operations. Such business logic is what prompted many news organizations to adopt web analytics tools. Web analytics has become one way for managers and owners to get their journalists meet business expectations without feeling explicitly obligated to do so. Web analytics also serves as a conduit for business logic to permeate the journalistic field—at the same time; it also allows the entry of a technological logic into journalism. Fields are always confronted with oppositions between the heteronomous and the autonomous poles.
