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This chapter focuses on the early days of online news, before profit, traffic, and metrics-based imperatives became key concerns. It pays close attention to the first years of TheNotebook in New York and LaPlace in Paris, two publications that started as innovative, playful, and collaborative editorial projects. It also describes how TheNotebook and LaPlace shared similar utopian beliefs but at the same time had distinct political and editorial identities. The chapter points out ways LaPlace was more countercultural, participatory, and politically engaged than TheNotebook, even though the French website is an explicit imitation of its U.S. counterpart. By comparing the identities and metrics of TheNotebook and LaPlace, the chapter also discusses how news websites handled the chase for clicks.

This chapter examines how TheNotebook and LaPlace websites entered the chase for traffic. It recounts how the two websites realized that they needed to attract more online readers to survive. It also talks about how TheNotebook and LaPlace developed the same editorial and organizational strategies to increase their traffic over time despite distinct political and editorial identities. The chapter shows how media organizations located thousands of miles apart ended up making similar editorial decisions when they entered the chase for clicks. It also provides an analysis of TheNotebook and LaPlace when they started experiencing an acute tension between editorial and click-based modes of evaluation, which affected the kind of content they published.

This chapter centers on the uses and interpretation of web analytics at TheNotebook and LaPlace. It talks about how the two publications used the same software programs to track the preferences of their online readers but made sense of the metrics provided by these programs in different ways. The chapter discusses the traffic in New York that soon became an imperative for the top editors in charge of managing the publication while staff writers refused to embrace the tyranny of metrics. It also looks into the journalists in Paris that were simultaneously deeply critical of traffic numbers and obsessed with clicks. It also shows how metrics do more than function as market indicators and reveal the journalists' representations of their algorithmic publics.

This chapter explores the consequences of distinct understandings of metrics on the daily life of news organizations. It looks into two key aspects of metrics: editorial production and compensation systems, and analyzes the editorial routines associated with online news production. The chapter assesses how TheNotebook and LaPlace websites handled the tension between “fast” and “slow” news and highlights contradictory views on the bureaucratic and disciplinary dynamics that structured the daily life of the two websites. It also reveals the differences in the distinct strategies of TheNotebook and LaPlace for handling the tension between click-based and editorial modes of evaluation. By showing how digital metrics become integrated in broader organizational dynamics, the chapter reveals the dialectical relationship between algorithms and their contexts.

This chapter explores the ramifications of the conflicting systems of evaluation by turning to the thorny question of compensation. It reviews the dilemma of TheNotebook and LaPlace websites on how to get people to work without enough money to pay all contributors a decent wage. The chapter talks about how in both websites traffic became an important criterion for deciding whom to pay and how much to pay them. It examines how compensations and wages affected the identities and careers of freelance journalists in America and France. It also analyzes why American journalists were less conflicted about using metrics-related criteria than their French counterparts.