A compass to navigate the audience? Translating public service values into measurable indicators

Abstract

The growing relevance of audience analytics in journalism raises concerns about favoring audience appeal over quality, potentially sidelining professional and organizational values. For Public Service Media (PSM), this poses a particular challenge: their societal remit and legitimacy demand metrics that go beyond commercial logic. Drawing on a conceptual framework integrating legitimacy theory, public value and audience analytics, this paper explores the development and implementation of the ZDF-Compass, a proprietary measurement system created by the German PSM organization ZDF. It is based on a qualitative case study comprising seven interviews with key managerial stakeholders involved in the development, supplemented by an analysis of ZDF-published materials and internal documents. Findings show that the ZDF-Compass was primarily initiated in response to regulatory requirements. While it aims to capture a broad range of value-related indicators, it places strong emphasis on user perspectives, partly outsourcing content evaluation to audiences. On the editorial level, it anchors performance goals within editorial units, potentially influencing content production and editorial culture. Although the system holds transformative potential for performance evaluation in PSM and beyond, this is limited by the continued dominance of simple usage metrics.