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

Citation

Morrison J (2020) From Community To Commerce? Analytics, audience 'engagement' and how local newspapers are renegotiating news values in the age of pageview-driven journalism. In: Gulyas A & Baines D (eds.) Routledge Companion to Local Media and Journalism. Routledge Media and Cultural Studies Companions. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 312-320. https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Local-Media-and-Journalism/Gulyas-Baines/p/book/9780815375364?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI9fX9koik_gIVlWDmCh0A3Qa2EAAYASAAEgIV7fD_BwE

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).

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