Staff Faints, Smelling Salts Passed As Publishers Get Tech Creative

Michael Hedges March 23, 2021 Follow on Twitter

Engagement has been savoured by publishers once traffic lost its steam. The term has a certain ring to it, like love. And it is certainly more warm and fuzzy than monetize, even though it’s money that matters. Engagement is not about filling up the comments section or winning cool awards. It’s about customers, once known as readers, letting loose of their money, often and vigorously.

The UK Daily Telegraph is one of the more recent newspaper publishers exploring the possibility of tying this engagement to journalist compensation. The UK Guardian, a competitor, obtained an email to staff from Telegraph editor Chris Evans loosely outlining such a plan. The Guardian published it last week (March 16) with a slew of derisive comments, not to be confused with engagement, from unnamed Telegraph employees and others.

The Telegraph uses a unique newsroom metrics system called Stars. It collects lots of data across their platform and crunches it all into bits. This is to reveal much more than consumer behavior, far more granular and in real-time. It may or may not be related to something similar used by Facebook since 2013 to blitz the advertising bots.

Publishers being publishers, this just might provide robust cost-benefit analysis: journalist compensation based on popularity. Actually, compensation would be based on clicks and subscription conversions. “It seems only right that those who attract and retain the most subscribers should be the most handsomely paid,” wrote editor Chris Evans in that leaked email.

The roughly described plan was swiftly excoriated. “The Telegraph’s plan to introduce clickbait scoring to pay and reward journalists is crass and shows scant regard for the importance of diverse quality journalism,” noted National Union of Journalists (NUJ) general secretary Michelle Stanistreet in a statement. “For a publisher that purports to have high journalistic standards at its core, this is a foolish move that will undermine its reputation and massively demoralise the journalists whose work is at the heart of the business.”

“This is a recipe for clickbait Telegraph mediocrity which removes one of the joys of journalism: to delight, surprise and, yes, give readers something they did not realise they might like or need,” offered esteemed former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber. “Pass me the smelling salts.” There were others.

The appropriate chains being pulled, Telegraph deputy editor Mike Adamson rushed to explain. “All that’s been said is that if we could use the analytics to find a fairer way of rewarding the best journalism then that’s what we might do. It’s not a plan, it’s a question at this stage,” he said, quoted by Press Gazette (March 16). “All journalists are rewarded according to a perception of their value to the publisher that they work for anyway and they always have been. If we could find a better way of doing that, we should consider it.”

None of this is particularly ground breaking. Last year editorial staff at the US newspaper Sacramento Bee appealed to publisher McClatchy chief executive Tony Hunter about a plan linking metrics to compensation “would negatively affect news gathering, employee morale and The Bee’s reputation,” said a letter from employee union Pacific Media Workers Guild, quoted by Sacramento Business Journal (October 23, 2020). The publisher refuted the claim as false, adding “to be successful, we must be agile, with a strong adherence to data-driven decision making, accountability and alignment.” The compensation plan was revealed just after McClatchy emerged from bankruptcy courtesy of hedge fund Chatham Asset Management.

In a similar vein, editorial staff at the Melbourne (Australia) Herald Sun were offered cash bonuses “based on page views and if casual readers attempting to read a paywalled story are motivated to buy a subscription,” reported The Conversation (July 4, 2019). News Corp, publisher of the Herald Sun and much, much more, has its own “proprietary analytics platform” called Verity that gives editors “real-time performance updates.” Called a “stimulus scheme” when announced, non-editorial workers would be included in time. Data from Verity led to an uptick in true crime stories.

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