Abstract
In this chapter, Martin and Dwyer investigate the ambiguities of social media signals and the difficulty of relying on them to determine the value of journalistic labour and products. They chart the rise of the metadata commodity, a new register of information commodification, which underpins the platform economy and its particular forms of capital accumulation, market organisation and competition. They then explore how social media analytics are created and what they purport to demonstrate, interrogating the factors that social platforms track in news use. In critiquing the accuracy of these metrics, they invite journalists to become more literate about the construction, operation and uses of social metrics so they can more effectively question their application to news production.
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Martin, F., Dwyer, T. (2019). The Numbers Game: Social News Analytics. In: Sharing News Online. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17906-9_3
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