ABSTRACT
Web metrics grant news organizations a deeper understanding of audiences and the news stories they consume but also pose new interpretive challenges – what do the numbers mean and how to act upon them? This chapter outlines the efforts put forward by a large Norwegian media company, Amedia, to go beyond merely recording digital traffic data to map what news content engages users and, importantly in the current economical situation, what news content triggers subscription sales. Additionally, this chapter examines how quantitative and qualitative approaches to metrics are received in a local news organization owned by Amedia. Metrics are imprecise and difficult to understand, and how newsrooms make sense of and utilize these analytics varies greatly. The local newsroom faces an interpretive challenge when applying the metrics in newsroom decisions. As the metrics from Amedia were insufficiently detailed, it became necessary for the editors to create their own database to ‘break down the data’. In order to make sense of the metrics, they had to be interpreted and adjusted for the local context. The metrics triggered several changes in the local newsroom, such as the new format of ‘rapid stories’.
