The life and death of political news: measuring the impact of the audience agenda using online data

Journal article

The rapid development of online media as a major location for news consumption has stimulated a variety of debates about how journalism is changing in the internet era. Of particular importance have been worries about a potential turn towards populism, whereby journalists and editors shift away from reporting what is newsworthy to what their audience wants to hear, supported by the widespread availability of audience metrics. A wealth of ethnographic research has pointed to the potential importance of such statistics; but little quantitative work has been conducted to test for the existence of a relationship between audience behavior and editorial decisions. This study seeks to fill that gap. Based on a novel dataset of over 40,000 articles published in 5 major UK news outlets over a period of 6 weeks, we explore the relationship between a news story’s readership and its likelihood of being removed from the front page, based on the ‘most read’ lists common to many news websites. We find that being a ‘most read’ article decreased the short-term likelihood of being removed from the front page by around 25%, and that this effect was broadly similar for both political and entertainment news. Surprisingly, we find a considerably greater influence in ‘quality’ publications than their tabloid counterparts. Our results are discussed as evidence of a still limited, but potentially developing, turn towards online populism.

Authors: Bright, J; Nicholls, T

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Journal: Social Science Computer Review
• Volume: 32
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 170-181
• Publication date: 2014-01-01
• Edition: Accepted Manuscript
• DOI: 10.1177/0894439313506845
• EISSN: 1552-8286
• ISSN: 0894-4393
• Language: English
• Keywords: audience metrics; online journalism; digital media
• Subjects: Internet research