“Living in the Market: How Freelance Web Journalists Manage their Reputations and Careers in the U.S. and France”
Sociological studies often emphasize the role of metrics in broader processes of convergence and homogenization. Yet numbers can also take on different meanings depending on their contexts. This article focuses on the case of journalism, a field transformed by quantification in the form of “clicks.” Drawing on ethnographic material gathered at two news websites – one in New York, the other in Paris – it documents important differences in the uses and meanings assigned to audience metrics in the United States and France. At the U.S. website, editors make significant decisions based on metrics but staff journalists are relatively unconcerned by them. At the French website, however, editors are conflicted about metrics but staff writers fixate on them. To understand these differences, this article analyzes how the trajectories of the U.S. and French journalistic fields affect newsroom dynamics. It shows how cultural differences can be reproduced at a time of technological convergence.
Bio: Angèle Christin is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and affiliated faculty n the Sociology Department at Stanford University. She studies how algorithms and analytics transform professional values, expertise, and work practices. Her current book project focuses on the case of web journalism, analyzing the growing importance of audience metrics (‘clicks’) in web newsrooms in the U.S. and France. Drawing on ethnographic methods, Angèle examines how American and French journalists make sense of traffic numbers in different ways, which in turn has distinct effects on the production of news in the two countries. In a new project, she studies the construction, institutionalization, and reception of predictive algorithms in the U.S. criminal justice system. Angèle published two books to date: an ethnographic analysis of a criminal court in the outskirts of Paris (Emergency Hearings: An Inquiry on Judiciary Practice, La Découverte, 2008) and an examination of recent theoretical and methodological trends in sociological research in the United States (Contemporary Sociology in the United States, with E. Ollion, La Découverte, 2012). She also worked on a statistical study of music taste and cultural participation in the United States and France, funded by the French Ministry of Culture. Angèle received her PhD in Sociology from Princeton University and the EHESS (Paris) in 2014. She is an affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute.