I have a friend who works at a major Australian news site. She tells me stories about editorial meetings where the discussion isn’t about what’s important or what readers need to know, but about what the data says will perform well.

An investigative piece that took weeks of work gets buried because the metrics predict low engagement. A provocative opinion piece gets promoted because similar content generated clicks last week. A story about actual policy complexity gets killed in favour of another piece about political personalities fighting.

The algorithm doesn’t care about journalism. It cares about engagement. And increasingly, engagement is driving editorial strategy.

This is a disaster for news quality, and we’re all suffering the consequences.

Let me be clear: engagement metrics aren’t inherently bad. Knowing what readers actually want is valuable. Understanding what resonates helps journalists connect with audiences. The problem is when metrics become the primary driver of editorial decisions rather than one input among many.

That’s what’s happening across Australian media. Outlets are increasingly letting data tell them what to publish, how to frame it, and where to position it. Editorial judgment—the expertise that comes from experience, knowledge, and understanding of what matters—is being subordinated to whatever the algorithm predicts will perform.

The results are predictable. Coverage becomes narrower because anything that doesn’t fit proven engagement patterns gets deprioritised. Stories become more sensational because subtle, complex pieces don’t generate metrics. Important but “boring” topics get ignored in favour of whatever drama will drive clicks.

You can see this in headline writing. Compare headlines from twenty years ago to today. The older ones described what the story was about. Current ones are optimised for clicks—provocative, emotionally charged, often misleading about the actual content. That’s not because modern journalists are less ethical. It’s because the metrics reward clickbait.

You can see it in story selection too. Political personality conflicts get endless coverage because they generate engagement. Policy details get minimal attention because they’re harder to make engaging. The result is political coverage that’s all theatre and no substance.

You can see it in the rise of opinion content. Opinion pieces are cheaper to produce than reporting and often generate more engagement because they’re provocative. So outlets publish more opinion and less journalism, driven by the metrics telling them what works.

The fundamental issue is that engagement metrics measure something different from journalistic value. High engagement doesn’t mean important or accurate or useful. It just means people clicked, and maybe shared or commented.

Sometimes important stories are engaging. Often they’re not. The most crucial issues—climate change, economic inequality, democratic backsliding—are complex and don’t lend themselves to viral moments. If editorial strategy is driven by metrics, these stories get marginalised.

This creates a vicious cycle. Serious coverage gets deprioritised because it doesn’t perform. Audiences get trained to expect sensational content. When serious coverage does appear, it doesn’t engage audiences who’ve been conditioned to expect something else. The metrics “prove” that serious journalism doesn’t work, leading to even less investment in it.

Meanwhile, outlets that chase metrics discover they’re competing with platforms that are much better at that game. You can’t out-viral TikTok. You can’t generate more engagement than Facebook. If that’s your strategy, you’ll lose to actual social media every time.

What media organisations could do instead is double down on what they’re actually good at: journalism. Investigation, analysis, context, expertise. The stuff that requires resources and skills that social platforms don’t have.

Some outlets have figured this out. They’ve realised that engagement metrics are useful for understanding audience behaviour, but terrible as the primary basis for editorial strategy. They use metrics as input while maintaining editorial judgment about what matters.

But they’re increasingly rare. Most Australian media organisations are trapped in a metrics-driven spiral, chasing engagement numbers that keep declining as audiences fragment and migrate to other platforms.

The business model pressure is real. When advertising revenue depends on pageviews, and pageviews depend on engagement, it’s hard to resist letting metrics drive decisions. But it’s also self-defeating, because it turns news outlets into worse versions of platforms they can’t compete with anyway.

What’s the alternative? Sustainable media business models that don’t depend entirely on advertising and engagement. That might mean subscriptions, memberships, public funding, or new models we haven’t invented yet. But it definitely means breaking the direct link between engagement metrics and editorial decisions.

It also means being honest about what engagement metrics can and can’t tell you. They’re useful for understanding what resonated with the audience you already have. They’re terrible at identifying what new audiences might need, what important stories aren’t yet recognised as important, or what will matter in five years.

Editorial judgment exists for those questions. It’s the accumulated wisdom of journalists who understand their beat, their audience, and their craft. Replacing that with algorithmic optimization is trading expertise for automation.

Some will argue this is just the market working—if audiences don’t engage with serious journalism, why should outlets provide it? But that assumes engagement metrics accurately reflect what audiences value, which is questionable. People engage with junk food too, but that doesn’t mean it’s what they actually need.

The difference between what people click and what serves them well is the space where journalism happens. Letting metrics collapse that distinction means abandoning journalism for content optimization.

Australian media is increasingly making that choice. Not because individual journalists want to, but because business pressures and metric-driven management push them that way.

We can do better. We should do better.

But as long as engagement metrics drive editorial strategy, we probably won’t.

The algorithm will keep optimising for clicks, and journalism will keep getting worse.