COMMColloquium

Distinguished Lecturer

All the News That’s Fit to Click

Caitlin Petre, Associate Professor, Rutgers University

1pm in 160 Mann

Journalists today are inundated with data about which stories attract the most clicks, likes, comments, and shares.  These metrics influence what stories are written, how news is promoted, and even which journalists get hired and fired. Do metrics make journalists more accountable to the public? Or are these data tools the contemporary equivalent of a stopwatch wielded by a factory boss, worsening newsroom working conditions and journalism quality? In All the News That’s Fit to Click, Caitlin Petre takes readers behind the scenes at the New York Times, Gawker, and the prominent news analytics company Chartbeat to explore how performance metrics are transforming the work of journalism.

Caitlin Petre is an Associate Professor of Journalism & Media Studies at Rutgers University. Her work examines the social processes, organizations, and actors behind the digital datasets and algorithms that increasingly govern the contemporary world. Petre’s book, All the News That’s Fit to Click (Princeton University Press), offers an ethnographic look at how performance analytics are transforming the work of journalism. Her scholarship has been published in Social Media & Society, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Sociologica, and Digital Journalism. She has been featured or quoted in popular publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the American Prospect, WIRED, and the Atlantic. Petre holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.