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How are transformations in newswork intersecting with changes in the monitoring of reader behavior and new technologies of audience measurement? How, in short, are journalistic ‘visions of the audience’ shifting in the online era, and how are they enabling particular editorial practices? This article explores a provocative tension between the now common rhetorical invocation of the news audience as a ‘productive and generative’ entity, and the simultaneous, increasingly common institutional reduction of the audience to a quantifiable, rationalizable, largely consumptive aggregate. The first half of article reviews the literature on the relationship between audience understanding and newsroom practices. The second half of the article is comprised of an ethnographic analysis of the manner by which increasingly prominent and widespread techniques of audience measurement and quantification interact with the …