Beyond Metrics: Understand how audiences experiences news

In our digitalized world, news media can easily monitor their users every move. From clicks, shares and comments to engaged time, scroll depth and return visits make the metrics that measure reach, engagement and loyalty increasingly precise.

Data-informed decision-making has clear advantages: it can help important
journalism reach audiences, support strategies that generate subscriptions,
and give news organizations a clearer image of how their content performs.

However, there are also risks. Engagement metrics are often interpreted as
signals of audience appreciation, encouraging the production of more content that captures attention – even when it erodes trust or the quality of the news experience. More fundamentally, metrics reduce real people – full of complex and sometimes contradictory needs, emotions, and desires – to mere behavioural traces. Metrics were never designed to capture the richness of people’s experiences with news.

Drawing on research into everyday news use, Associate Professor Tim Groot Kormelink will show in his session what dominant metrics miss about audiences’ experiences - and why that matters for news organizations and the future of journalism. And importantly, he will also explore the practical ways news organizations can combine analytics with richer approaches to understanding how their audiences value news and journalism.