Bright, Jonathan and Nicholls, Tom 
ORCID: 0000-0002-6971-8614
(2014)
The Life and Death of Political News: Measuring the Impact of the Audience Agenda Using Online Data.
SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW, 32 (2).
pp. 170-181.
Abstract
<jats:p> 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 toward 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 data set of over 40,000 articles published in five 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 toward online populism. </jats:p>
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | online journalism, audience metrics, digital media |
| Divisions: | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of the Arts |
| Depositing User: | Symplectic Admin |
| Date Deposited: | 12 Apr 2021 08:34 |
| Last Modified: | 18 Jan 2023 22:53 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/0894439313506845 |
| Open Access URL: | https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5cb38355-7c82-45... |
| Related URLs: | |
| URI: | https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3118810 |
Dimensions
Dimensions
