"All the News That's Fit to Click:" Caitlin Petre explains how metrics are reshaping how American newsrooms operate

Reliable Sources

CNN

News

3.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2021

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The arrival of audience metrics went off like a "bomb" inside newsrooms like The New York Times, Caitlin Petre says. Petre researched how The Times and Gawker reckoned with analytics in very different ways. The result is her new book "All the News That's Fit to Click." Chartbeat metrics became "addictive" for some journalists as the "habit forming" offerings "mimicked digital games," encouraging users to "boost" their scores and "work harder and harder," Petre says. And for the average consumer? "Keep in mind," she says, that with every click, "you are actually sending a message or signal back to a newsroom." To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Everybody knows the word clickbait.
0:04.5	Clickbait, it's almost become a cliche, a reference to an article or a video or a story
0:11.2	that's just designed to get you to click.
0:15.7	But it identifies a real phenomenon and a destabilizing force in media, something that's
0:22.3	been happening for more than a decade at this point.
0:26.1	What has the introduction of new metrics and analytics done to the news business?
0:32.7	What has happened inside newsrooms as they're driven more and more by traffic, page views,
0:39.1	clicks, engagement?
0:41.9	Those are a couple of the questions for this week's reliable sources podcast.
0:46.1	So let's cue the music.
0:49.8	I'm Brian Stelter and this weekly podcast is our chance to go in depth with media leaders
0:55.0	and newsmakers talking about how the media world really works.
1:00.0	And that's something that Caitlin Petrie has been studying for more than 10 years.
1:06.5	Petrie is now an assistant professor at the School of Communication and Information
1:09.8	at Rutgers University.
1:12.1	Her work is about the social processes behind digital data sets and algorithms that
1:17.7	govern our contemporary world.
1:20.7	And she has been studying, very specifically, how audience metrics have reshaped American
1:27.3	newsrooms and media companies.
1:30.5	She started working on this research back in the late Aughts.
1:35.7	And as she's about to tell you, she examined the New York Times and Gawker and Chartbeat
1:42.8	in great detail to understand how analytics have transformed journalism.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from CNN, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of CNN and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.