"Management by Metrics Is Upending Newsrooms"
by @VWPickard in Jacobin
Journalism is in crisis. The past two decades have seen tens of thousands of newspaper jobs vanish and hundreds of communities become news deserts. Run-amok commercialism continues to hollow out and distort our news media in increasingly dangerous ways. Yet, despite such worrying signs, the precise contours of these structural transformations often escape scrutiny, and it’s often unclear what’s truly new. After all, profit-driven media have always underserved and misrepresented large segments of society along socioeconomic divides. Informational redlining is baked into the very DNA of a commercial press that privileges profits over people.
What we’re witnessing today, however, is the late-stage decay of advertising-dependent, market-driven journalism. Many of the most visible maladies — the feeding frenzies of vulture capitalist hedge funds, the far-right propagandists exploiting news vacuums, the platform monopolies voraciously devouring ad revenue and amplifying misinformation — are opportunistic parasites exacerbating the crisis, not the root cause. The entire commercial structure is rotten to its core, and the far-reaching implications of this decomposition, especially for those working toward a more democratic future, have yet to be fully appraised.
While the symptoms of commercial media’s structural pathologies are legion, one that’s increasingly visible and yet under-studied is how the desperate search for ever-diminishing revenues worsens labor conditions — which in turn degrades journalists’ well-being, the content they produce, and society writ large.
Read the rest here: https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/journalism-metrics-news-management-profit-clicks-gawker-analytics/