Metric anxiety is fueling a dangerous decline in quality queer journalism

TL;DR: The news media’s growing reliance on web analytics, engagement and page views to set the news agenda poses a uniquely significant threat to LGBTQIA+ journalism and its ability to fight for equality. It has already impacted brands such as PinkNews, them, and more, but a number of new outlets are using community-rooted models to fill the gap.

Metrics in modern newsrooms have become a tricky subject to navigate. Once a quaint tool in the arsenal of a digital journalist, web analytics—the act of tracking and analysing traffic to a site—have become mandatory in the digital news economy. They are a polarising component of a journalist’s day-to-day work. For many, they have become synonymous with the seedy, profit-driven underbelly of journalism, where the news agenda is guided not by public interest but by pre-established reports on the popularity of certain subjects.

The Reuters Institute has dubbed this phenomenon as ‘metrics anxiety’: the fear that a reliance on web analytics risks transforming journalism into a glorified content mill that submits to the whims of the algorithm. These fears aren’t unfounded—research on the impact of web metrics published in 2018 suggests that publishers driven by metrics are more likely to produce soft, surface-level news that relies on fewer sources—and represents a growing dissonance between journalists and the technology they use.

No sector of journalism is at a greater risk to the perils of optimisation than LGBTQIA+ journalism. Over the past decade, the veritable rainbow of queer news media—from independent news blogs to fully-fledged publications—has become crucial in the fight for equality and autonomy across the globe.

Its position as a sobering antithesis to harmful disinformation pushed by swathes of legacy media brands and political pundits is critical in an age when our rights are being rolled back. Yet the queer news sector has too fallen prey to the growing trend of metric-driven news churn that looms over much of the industry.

It’s seen prominent brands pivot away from LGBTQIA+ news, with the likes of PinkNews moving to a ‘reporter free newsroom’, and legacy media groups like Condé Nast selling off its LGBTQIA+ publication, Them. This metric anxiety is undoing the progress that the queer community has fought so hard for.

A history of web analytics in newsrooms

It’s actually possible to pinpoint the day that news changed forever: January 19, 1994. It was the day that Palo Alto Weekly, an online news digest based in San Francisco, was founded. Widely believed to be the first-ever digital news publication, its creation opened the floodgates for journalism’s breakneck expansion into the increasingly popular World Wide Web.

It’s easy to understate how significant the internet boom of the mid-1990s was for journalism. Innovations in home computing and the mass adoption of dial-up modems created an accessible medium of news found through the internet: digital news. Print, radio, and TV became known as the first, second, and third media, respectively. In 1988, the United Nations News Committee defined digital news as the ‘Fourth Medium’.

While legacy outlets first began dabbling in digital news in 1992, it wasn’t until 1994 that the digital media gold rush began; brands like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times, and USA Today led the charge with early digital news sites. Further technological advances in the 2000s, including the rise of search engines and social media platforms, transformed digital news from a quaint bullet point in an investment portfolio into a new frontier that gave media brands a level of outreach that seemed impossible just years earlier.

These innovations gave birth to a wave of ‘digital native’ outlets whose output was entirely online. HuffPost and Vice News began setting the standard for what online news looked like, both editorially and commercially.

This caught the eye of start-ups in the similarly emerging industry of digital marketing. Third-party web tools like Omniture, Clicktale, and Urchin (later renamed to Google Analytics following its acquisition in 2005), provided editors with game-changing insights into an article’s viewership ratings. The low-cost advantages of these programs drove their popularity to boom in record time; web analytics had now gripped the news industry.

As these tools grew more complex—evolving from simple weekly emails on page views to real-time analytics on retention rate, SEO rankings, and more—several newsrooms began fully embracing metrics as the new way to set the news agenda and optimise content. Newsrooms commonly displayed metric leaderboards showcasing the top articles of the day—a practice that remains ubiquitous today. Because of their advantages, web analytics became mandatory for any newsroom that wanted to stay afloat in this new digital world.

This desperate furore to stay ahead of the metric game gave way to the rise of ‘metric anxiety’. New York Times columnist David Carr captured the growing cynicism towards metrics in his 2010 article Taylor Momsen Did Not Write This Headline—a column which had nothing to do with the titular Gossip Girl star, using her name to instead make a point about how the art of headline had devolved into a practice of keyword-cramming.

Carr posited that journalists were now caught between their duties to produce quality journalism and adhere to the metric-fuelled whims of their managers. In 2014, Chartbeat’s former CEO Tony Haile once again captured the rise in metric anxiety, writing in Time that optimisation had “flooded the web with spam, linkbait, painful design, and tricks that treated users like lab rats.”

Web analytics today: a tug-of-war between ethics and views

In the nearly three decades they have existed, web analytics have changed almost every aspect of journalism's functionality and purpose. Nearly 71% of journalists use newsroom analytics in the UK, according to the Reuters Institute, while a staggering 89% say audience research has at least some influence on what stories they write. A survey of 2,700 journalists published by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) in 2017, meanwhile, found that over 70% of newsrooms base their content decisions primarily on page views.

Despite this, publishers are no closer to addressing the fears of the metric-anxious within their newsrooms. In his 2023 book, News and How To Use It, British journalist Alan Rusbridger—editor-in-chief of The Guardian from 1995-2015—said there remains a huge debate around the dangers that metrics pose to the fundamental pillars of ethical journalism, but that they were here to stay “for better and for worse.”

Modern-day critics of metric-driven reporting typically argue the practice grew out of an advertising strategy disconnected from journalism's fundamental aims and thus has no place in the newsroom. Rusbridger instead posited that its impact could be far more insidious, writing: “The presence of visible analytics in a newsroom could make journalists feel under pressure to respond even in the absence of explicit instructions from executives.

“If a weatherman was blown over on live television in Kansas and subsequently went viral, you could be sure that hundreds of news organisations worldwide would publish their own version of the story within hours in a desperate grab for clicks,” he continues.

Researchers from the University of Zurich in Switzerland confirmed a key concern among the metric-anxious after finding in a 2020 study that a reliance on audience metrics typically has a negative impact on the quality of news, too. The study’s author, Silke Fürst, said that newsrooms which prioritise increasing audience traffic, particularly smaller, profit-driven outlets, prioritise quantity over quality, commending journalists who write multiple “quick hit” articles in a given day, regardless of quality, while chastising those that focus on original stories with diverse sources.

This puts smaller publishers on a lethal trajectory: the more stories they produce, the further they dip in quality. The further they dip, the less likely people are to read them, which lowers metrics and pressures management to push journalists to write more articles. This cycle continues until either the outlet goes bankrupt or overworked journalists resign.

This isn’t a hypothetical scenario; it’s exactly what happened to BuzzFeed News. Originally created in 2011 as an extension of the listicle and quiz site, the outlet used a mixture of social media referrals, audience metrics, and web analytics to push its output to millions. Despite its initial success and fast-earned acclaim for its journalistic integrity, the wider outlet’s reliance on the ‘social media ecosystem’ would ultimately lead to its demise.

A sharp decline in Facebook referral traffic and instability on Twitter tanked BuzzFeed’s stock in the early 2020s, forcing Peretti to announce the closure of the site’s news arm along with over 180 layoffs—15% of BuzzFeed’s total staff. In a leaked internal memo from 2023, Peretti blamed an “over-investment” in social-first web content for the decision.

Rusbridger argued against prioritising clicks above all else, writing that editors who claim stories are designed to generate clicks are “missing the long game.” He pointed to research from data aggregators that suggest the real key to success is reader retention, writing: “If you can hold a visitor’s attention for just three minutes, they are twice as likely to return than if you only hold them for one.”

How one of the largest gay news outlets fell victim to an industry obsessed with analytics

It’s a cloudy Tuesday morning in July 2005. 23-year-old Benjamin Marc Cohen—dot-com bubble millionaire and former columnist for The Times, best known at the time for losing a trademark dispute against Apple— has formally registered PinkUnlimited.co.uk Ltd. It’s a holding company for his gay and lesbian news blog, which would later become PinkNews.

The self-professed ‘world’s largest and most influential LGBTQ+ led media brand’ has, over the past few years, taken a major reputational hit in the eyes of the LGBTQIA+ public. While much of this is down to a myriad of controversies around its work culture, a shift towards social-first content has generated concerns centred around metric-anxiety.

PinkNews’ creation marked the beginning of a new era for LGBTQ+ journalism. Not only was it one of the earliest and biggest examples of a digital-native queer news outlet, but its output also stood in stark contrast to the risqué tabloid output of Gay Times during that era. Instead, PinkNews was focused on political news stories through the guise of LGBTQ+ rights. Soon after its launch, the site became an immensely popular source of queer news, interviews, and more, even securing a column from former Prime Minister Tony Blair just months into its lifespan.

Cohen himself said the site’s initial strategy was built purely on a foundational desire to improve the landscape of LGBTQ+ news reporting. In a column on PinkNews’ second anniversary, he said the site was borne out of a desire to write articles he had failed to commission at The Times. As the site’s popularity grew, he said it “became clear [...] that there was a demand for quality gay journalism” and opted to dedicate himself to the blog full-time, writing upwards of seven to eight articles a day.

As the site’s popularity grew, so too did its political influence in the UK. It took on legacy media behemoths like The Sun and The News of the World with its investigations into anti-LGBTQ+ reporting. Its Out4Marriage campaign helped lay the groundwork for the eventual passing of the Marriage (Same-sex Couples) Act 2013—a feat which then-Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron punctuated by writing the first of 16 PinkNews columns.

It platformed Prime Ministers, Archbishops, and a litany of influential figures. For many, PinkNews had become synonymous with LGBTQ+ equality in the UK; as Cohen put it: “Since then, we’ve been in the address book of every right-thinking MP, peer and government minister. No-one ignores a phone call from PinkNews.co.uk unless they want to look anti-gay.”

Its success led to a massive boom in the late 2010s. Rebranding to PinkNews Media Group in 2015, the outlet began expanding into commercial partnerships following the success of the venerable PinkNews Awards, as well as short-form video content published on social media. In 2018, it became the first LGBTQ+ publisher to appear on Snapchat’s ‘Discover’ page, jumpstarting a move towards ‘social-first’ video content that would eventually put the brand in hot water.

The decision to invest in Snapchat was part of an aim to “change publishing” according the brand’s then-Head of Content and Snapchat Launch Editor, Ellen Stewart, who told Press Gazette at the time that PinkNews planned to make waves by “being the first to do ‘X’, ‘Y’, and ‘Z’.” At first, the move was incredibly lucrative, carrying the outlet through the COVID-19 pandemic and landing Cohen among PressGazette’s 18 global news industry leaders of 2023. Reports from the same year suggest that, by then, Snapchat ads had become a significant part of the organisation’s revenue stream.

During this time, it was clear that the brand’s perception of media success was changing rapidly. A blog post Cohen wrote in 2019 reminiscing on the brand’s history measures its success through the size of its audience, which he claimed had reached a combined 50 million at the time.

In another article from July in the same year, Cohen used a 2015 YouGov poll on the sexuality of under-24s to highlight a “huge opportunity” for PinkNews to grow by relying on Snapchat. To its founder, PinkNews was no longer “just a news publisher” but had evolved into a “lifestyle brand” designed to spread its content to as many people as possible while making millions per year.

The social-first successes of its Snapchat channels would be short-lived. By August 2023, Cohen said its new revenue stream had plateaued “a bit quicker than planned”, citing a widespread decline in Facebook traffic that was affecting multiple news outlets, and an increase in competition on Snapchat.

Just months later, PressGazette reported that the plateau was, in fact, a deficit and that PinkNews had been losing money every month for the first half of 2023. This resulted in the first wave of a series of layoffs and a strategic restructure which prioritised what PinkNews claims was its largest source of income: page views. PinkNews recently announced another round of layoffs after Snapchat pivoted its model, PinkNews told staff the change by the app could reduce revenue it gets from the platform by 80 to 90%.

These issues were compounded by growing calls for a boycott fueled by multiple controversies, including the PinkNews Awards’ sponsorship deal with the Royal Bank of Canada—one of the largest financiers of fossil fuels in the world.

This sat alongside accusations of a ‘toxic’ work culture. Multiple reviews from current and former employees posted to the review site Glassdoor paint a stark picture of the way this restructure impacted day-to-day work life at PinkNews. The ‘top liked’ review from February 2024 claims the company became a “video content farm” guided by the CEO’s “snap decisions on strategy”. Another, posted in November 2023, describes it as “embarrassingly dysfunctional, disorganised, and toxic.” Accusations were also published on a whistleblower social media account which was deleted when threatened with a lawsuit, and a BBC documentary which explores sexual misconduct and workplace culture allegations against the news organisation, and directly at both Cohen and his husband, COO Anthony James, which they both firmly deny.

Consumers of PinkNews' content have witnessed and commented on these dips in quality and purpose beneath many of its recent social media posts, and amid these controversies. In our analysis of the 14 videos published to its Snapchat page between late April and early June, it is clear that ten are short-form gossip clips about straight people. Meanwhile, a significant amount of its recent videos focus on specifically controversial celebrities or influencers, with notably controversial figures such as Eugena Cooney, Gypsy Rose-Blanchard, and James Charles.

This years-long period of steady decline culminated in PinkNews making all of its editorial reporters redundant in a bid to create what insiders claimed was being called a ‘reporter-free newsroom.’ QueerAF analysis of the pivot to this AI-driven newsroom noted the website had begun taking 100-200 word captions, primarily written for social media posts by its audience team, and uploading them to the website.

Over on its website, PinkNews has since platformed former Health Secretary Wes Streeting. The article, which appears to falsely conflate two separate reviews from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). The outlet also faced backlash for an article which originally featured the headline: “What is crossdressing and is it different from being trans?”.

‘Click thinking’ and the risks it poses to LGBTQIA+ journalism

It’s difficult to analyse PinkNews's steady decline without acknowledging the unique schadenfreude apparent in public criticism of the brand. Take, for instance, this 2024 tweet from Darren Styles OBE—managing director of Attitude Magazine and vocal critic of both Cohen and PinkNews—in which he writes that a since-deleted post from the infamous ‘PinkNews Whistleblowers’ account “made me giggle.”

To many commentators, former staff and those close to the brand, PinkNews’ failings stem from egocentric, out-of-touch leadership hellbent on increasing profits rather than enacting real change. Managerial decisions may well have played a significant hand in what went wrong; but blaming that aspect alone deflects the impact that the industry’s trajectory had in shaping those decisions and, what’s worse, assumes that no other outlet is susceptible to a similar fate.

In reality, PinkNews is just one example of an LGBTQIA+ news outlet succumbing to the allure of the algorithm. Attitude Magazine has a long history of criticism from some corners of the LGBTQIA+ community for prioritising commercially safe, gay and bi men’s, algorithmically friendly luxury and lifestyle content, with an over-focus on hypermasculine and unrealistic body types in its fashion and cover editorials - amid a broader content focus.

Marking its 300th edition in 2018, Styles noted how the magazine was changing under his leadership, but admitted that the magazine had a history of a culture where staff believed having a “non-white face on the cover had a negative impact on sales” but said he didn’t believe the magazine was “institutionally racist”. Indeed, facing a shifting UK queer media landscape, Attitude has kept up its news output in the last year, including on Trans+ rights developments.

Meanwhile, its main commercial rival Gay Times, despite doing a crowd-investment round with its marketing promising to invest in “bold, investigative journalism to uncover those rolling back our rights”, is yet to publish any news investigations. Instead, it pivoted its investment funding to pivot the brand’s revenue model to a subscription focus that continues its lifestyle, celebrity, and sexuality journalism approach. Despite saying it would continue to offer free content, its entire archive is now behind a paywall. Diva Magazine has also pivoted toward a charitable foundation model to garner financial support in new ways.

In the US, the LGBTQIA+ media brand Equalpride, whose outlets include Out, The Advocate, Pride.com, and more, announced mass staff layoffs after relying too heavily on web advertisements to make ends meet. Within a short time, Condenast sold off them to the group. It left the already dwindling LGBTQIA+ staff pool at the legacy media brand decimated, and now the popular outlet once known as a leader in breaking critical queer news developments is now only syndicating content from other Equal Pride outlets.

These and so many other examples point to an emerging journalistic culture known as ‘click-thinking’. Coined in 2013 by media sociologist An Nguyen, it describes a managerial mindset in stark contrast to metric-anxiety, where page views become primary motivators in making editorial decisions. Managers who have succumbed to ‘click-thinking’ obsessively use audience data to guide virtually every editorial decision they make. This risks exacerbating one of journalism’s most prevalent issues: the dumbing down of the news agenda.

“If metrics were to dominate online journalism, they would be likely to stimulate a massive online migration of the many traditional print and TV tabloid practices,” Nguyen writes. “These include, among others, ‘the sensationalisation of news, the abbreviation of news stories, the proliferation of celebrity gossip, and the more intensive visual material such as large photographs and illustrations.”

Because web analytics have become a core part of modern digital journalism, non-legacy outlets founded in a post-digital media landscape are particularly susceptible to ‘click-thinking’ primarily because of the assumption that it’s the only way to stay afloat. For LGBTQIA+ outlets, this is an especially damaging and often lethal mentality.

By their very nature, page views demand that successful content must appeal to as many people as feasibly possible. Because of a concerted campaign to promote anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric, pushed by right-wing legacy media brands, search engine and social media algorithms now assume that LGBTQIA+ content is unpopular or offensive and should be suppressed, putting outlets at an inherent disadvantage.

This was highlighted in a 2024 report from nonprofit Freedom House in which analysts claimed censorship of vulnerable communities, including the LGBTQ+ community, was having a detrimental impact on internet freedom more broadly.

Over time, this discrepancy creates a cyclical effect. Take the UK, for example: research published by academic Jessica Kant suggests that the Daily Mail, an outlet which has a long history of publishing anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric, produces more coverage of trans people per year than any other outlet in the UK. Amnesty UK found in that JK Rowling was mentioned four times as often as actual trans people in media coverage of 'trans issues' over a five-year period.

The stories that are published about Trans+ people are typically outlandish, poorly researched, and easily debunked. But their frequency legitimises the rhetoric behind them in the eyes of the public and, by extension, the algorithm. Kant notes that, in the US, a GOP Senator falsely claimed that “almost half” of child-friendly content on Netflix features trans characters in the same month that over 200 stories on the subject appeared in her dataset. Because of this cycle, ‘click-thinking’ newsrooms are incentivised to remain silent on issues viewed as ‘controversial’ if they wish to grow.

This is the very situation PinkNews and other LGBTQIA+ outlets have found themselves in by relying purely on web analytics to grow; like so many other brands, it capitalised on the lucrative world of social-first video content, riding a high brought by marriage equality in the UK.

When LGBTQIA+ rights were once again at risk, PinkNews was given a choice: continue to serve the LGBTQIA+ community despite the potential impacts, or submit to the allure of mass-producing popular, uncontroversial content. Like the brands that followed it, its decision to cave to the whims of the algorithm has left it in reputational and financial tatters.

Analysis: The outlets defying the obsession

Given the industry’s ever-growing reliance on web analytics and the countless examples of outlets falling foul to the dangers of click-thinking, it’s easy for metric-anxiety to develop into defeatist acceptance of the algorithm as it exists, but this doesn’t have to be true.

Corners of digital news, particularly among LGBTQIA+ outlets, have begun to evolve beyond the need of web metrics to thrive. News publishers and independent blogs such as Erin Reeds’ Erininthemorning, Trans News Network, and, indeed, even QueerAF itself have relied on revenue sources such as crowdfunding and reader subscriptions to produce vital, investigative and original pieces with the community at the heart of their creation.

Legacy media brands such as The Times have also begun to set a new precedent for success in the industry by taking on a ‘less is more’ approach. In 2025, the newspaper reduced the number of stories it published by 20%, choosing instead to focus its resources on producing “fewer, better stories”. According to the PressGazette, this led to a boom in audience growth over three consecutive months.

In his report on click-thinking, Nguyen suggested that the solution isn’t to scrap web analytics entirely, but to position them as another tool in the editor’s belt rather than the answer to every editorial quandary. By relying on the confidence of their own judgement in editorial decision-making rather than the “sentiment of the crowd,” Nguyen writes that this would position the pillars of ethical journalism at the core of news writing once again, allowing metrics to “serve us rather than us serve them.”

Indeed, Nguyen’s principle is inherently queer. Resisting the urge to please them and focusing on serving us is something our community does best. In an age when our rights are so acutely under attack, from policymakers to legacy press - leading with our narrative and filling the room with stories that we know count will be critical.

But serving our community with information obscured by legacy media serves a public-interest goal that readers expect from journalism outlets. An interest that isn't being served well enough, despite queer people having a huge appetite for it, so they can use this information, news, and analysis to fuel their liberation work.

Understand the LGBTQIA+ news

I started QueerAF as a response to the bad practices I saw while working in gay media and mainstream media newsrooms.

We first began as a podcast when an editor told me to stop pitching 'gay stories' because there was no 'money' or 'audience' for them.

As a young, budding journalist - this was hard to hear. And its impact was huge. It made me think pursuing a career with our lives in mind was worthless.

No one should be told their lives aren't worth telling a story about.

Later on, working in gay media, I experienced a different barrier to telling the stories that our community wanted. Something that got in the way of what many incredible journalists were trying to deliver. We were told the stories that matter won't create enough clicks to make it worthwhile.

I didn't understand this then, but newsrooms created these awful experiences because they are locked into a system. One that rewards stories that feed hungry divisive algorithms. All to serve enough ads to simply repeat the cycle over again.

As a journalist and producer, I've seen newsrooms make cruel decisions. Content commissioned based on the clicks they'll drive, regardless of the harm they might have.

We need media that makes content because it's worthwhile to our community.

That moves the narrative forward instead of just using us as a tool to drive their ad revenue. That's where QueerAF's registered non-profit community interest, and press regulated model offers a uniquely different approach.

Meanwhile, our memberships keep us grounded in what our community needs, not what drives clicks.

Help us deliver even more of our award-winning queer accountability journalism with a QueerAF membership. They start at just £4 a month and every membership helps us invest in Trans+ journalists, in the fight back for all of us.

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