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Record W4320482651 · doi:10.32920/22090655

News by Numbers: The evolution of analytics in journalism

2023· preprint· en· W4320482651 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Nicole Blanchett

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicMedia Studies and Communication
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAnalyticsSocial mediaJournalismSocial media analyticsDECIPHERPublic relationsComputer sciencePolitical scienceInternet privacySociologyAdvertisingMedia studiesWorld Wide WebBusinessData science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Analytics are now embedded in newsroom practice. In a form of participative gatekeep-ing, the ability to track how the audience absorbs information is shaping editorial content.Although there is much discussion that engagement metrics, like time spent, are moreimportant than pageviews, many advertisers are still more interested in clicks than count-ing time, some newsrooms still have pageview targets, and the pageviews metric is oftenused as a simplistic measure of reach. As such, digital editors sit cemented to monitors,working to decipher what stories have or are gaining traction. Using this information,they choose placement of content, enhance stories, and share stories via social media tobuild traffic, then repeat this frenetic cycle in a seemingly endless loop. But at what cost?How does the focus on metrics affect best practice in the newsroom and, potentially,information sharing in the public sphere? This article examines the impact of audiencedata on practice atThe Hamilton Spectator, a local newsroom in Canada, to explorewhether traffic-based metrics and the use of analytics impede the ability to meet jour-nalistic standards, and/or build bigger, more informed and engaged audiences

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.054
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.123
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.054
Threshold uncertainty score0.286

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0540.123
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0150.018
Science and technology studies0.0040.029
Scholarly communication0.0380.052
Open science0.0030.009
Research integrity0.0040.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.002

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.080
GPT teacher head0.367
Teacher spread0.288 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations4
Published2023
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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