News Selection Criteria in the Digital Age: Professional Norms Versus Real-Time Audience Metrics

• In Event: The News Audience

Abstract

On newspaper websites journalists can observe the preferences of the audience for free and in unprecedented detail, based on the page views for specific news articles.
This enables journalists to cater to these preferences.
In this paper we discuss the implications of the use of page views for news selection, and analyze five national newspapers from the Netherlands according to whether and how they use this information.
Using a cross-lagged analysis, we found that story lines of the most-viewed articles were more likely to receive more attention in subsequent reporting.
This supports the hypothesis that journalists use this information in news selection.
However, interviews with editors of the newspapers suggest that journalists consider the use of this information for news selection to be a taboo.
We elaborate on the implications of this discrepancy in the norms and behaviors of journalists, and project directions for future studies.

Authors

• Kasper Welbers, VU University Amsterdam

• Wouter van Atteveldt, VU University Amsterdam

• Jan Kleinnijenhuis, VU University - Amsterdam

• Nel Ruigrok, Erasmus U Rotterdam

• Joep Schaper, U of Amsterdam