Caitlin Petre, media sociologist at Rutgers University, has just published All the News That’s Fit to Click, a critical look at how performance analytics are transforming the work of profit-driven journalism. She exposes how newsroom metrics that measure and gauge reader engagement with digital news content represent a new form of intensified commercial pressure. Journalists are driven to optimize their content for clicks in ways that end up reshaping the newsroom power dynamics and their own working conditions. Journalism, after all is a form of labor—and one that has become increasingly casualized and precarious. Caitlin Petre’s account of data-driven journalism is also an important preview of how the metrics revolution may transform other professions with far-reaching implications. We talk to Caitlin about her research and ask what it portends for intellectual labor or knowledge work. 

Read Victor Pickard's excellent review of Caitlin Petre's book in Jacobin.

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