Media and Impact: Why Are We (Still) Talking About It?
There are at least three particular forces that make media impact a timely subject.
Funding for nonprofit journalism comes with impact requirements
The rise of nonprofit news organizations roughly coincides with the decline in traditional, legacy news outlets. The nonprofit model is supported by philanthropic foundations, individual donors, and members. According to a recent Knight Foundation report, foundation support accounted for fifty-eight percent of nonprofit news revenue in 2013.6 However, many of the current, large funders of journalism, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Omidyar Network, have historically funded service delivery organizations and projects, not media7 8—a trend widely discussed in the nonprofit media and philanthropic communities. This creates an immediate tension, as, for example, it’s far easier to measure the impact of inoculations administered than the impact of a series of news reports on the importance of inoculations. Furthermore, service organizations have clear goals, while media organizations often have broader and more vague missions around values like contributing to a healthy democracy or protecting the public interest. However, as nonprofit media organizations and their funders have negotiated (often uneasy) partnerships, academics and other researchers have edged into the conversation and proposed other methods for understanding media’s effects—both on individual behavior and more complicated processes like framing public debate on issues.
The crisis of trust in journalism has made impact a brand differentiator
This second trend has been less explored but may have more powerful implications for media, including commercial media. In an era during which the public’s trust in legacy news organizations is rapidly eroding,9 a media organization’s ability to understand its impact and then communicate that impact to its audience can potentially increase the organization’s perceived trustworthiness in the eyes of the audience. If this hunch were proven to be true, this would have huge implications for the media industry and its long-term sustainability.
The rise of analytics data has produced a culture and means of measurement, and demanded a counterweight
The last decade’s boom in newsroom analytics has influenced newsroom operations. It is commonplace to have loads of metrics that can be interpreted as indications of the success of journalists’ output. The first wave of audience data tools focused on pretty crude measures (often aligned with the needs of those selling advertising)—clicks, unique visitors, and visits. The state of analytics has massively evolved since then, capturing virality and user actions on page, among many other data points. Many journalists, upon publishing a story, pay close attention to how it spreads on Twitter and Facebook. In her report, “The Traffic Factories,” Tow Center fellow Caitlin Petre observed that while newsrooms’ cultural values play a big part in how staff use and perceive analytics, the very existence of readily available data that could be used to indicate a story’s worth is a potent force.10 This defines the modern media, and separates the era of digital platforms from analogue. Some are troubled by this, whether they condemn it outright, or seek to synthesize the traffic and social analytics practices with computable indications of journalism’s other social values—impact in particular.