From Community To Commerce? Analytics, audience 'engagement' and how local newspapers are renegotiating news values in the age of pageview-driven journalism

Abstract

First paragraph: Industrialized newspaper journalism has long been propelled by more ‘market- driven’ motives (McManus, 1994 ) than any high- minded Burkean commitment to the ideals of a pluralist, truth- seeking “Fourth Estate” (Grande, 2014 ). From the sensational ‘yellow journalism’ patented by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst in the 1890s to the launch of picture- heavy tabloids like Rupert Murdoch’s (reinvented) Sun and Gannett’s USA Today three- quarters of a century later, to today’s ongoing absorption of swaths of local papers into regional conglomerates, the pursuit of profit as an engine of news production has consistently manifested itself as both a symptom and enabler of the “gradual shift away from financial dependence on political parties to dependence on circulation and advertising revenues” (Hampton, 2010 , 6).