Knowledge@Wharton: "How Much Is Web Traffic Changing the News You Read?"

From K@W:

If you’ve ever thought that the quest for more clicks is affecting the sorts of articles that get published in the media, Wharton marketing professor Pinar Yildirim wants you to know that you’re right. But it’s not quite the overarching impact that you might expect.

In this interview with Knowledge@Wharton, she talks about a new paper, “Clicks and Editorial Decisions: How Does Popularity Shape Online News Coverage?” The paper, which was co-authored by Ananya Sen, a doctoral candidate in economics at the Toulouse School of Economics in France, teases out the differences in how high-traffic stories get treated in terms of longer-term coverage.
An edited transcript of the conversation appears below.

Searching for a Bias toward Profit:
In this study, what we are interested in is documenting any sort of bias that might be happening in newspapers related to the availability of digital data and big data. Consumers often wonder what goes through an editor’s mind when they look at newspapers: How do news stories make it to the newspaper that they read or the TV that they watch? Are they selected based on some sort of particular agenda of the newspaper, or are they sorted based on their importance?

Now, if you ask a journalist, up until recently, at least, they would give you the answer that, “Yes, news stories are selected based on their newsworthiness, their importance, and the novelty — how important they are, how new they are, to the public.” However, if this is the case, consumers may also wonder, “Why is it that we see so many cat pictures?” or “Why is it that we see so many quizzes on the news media?”

We had an alternate hypothesis: Perhaps there are other concerns in an editor’s mind, especially these days, when the editors are fed so much information about how the individual stories on online news websites are doing.

“When we looked at whether traffic that’s received by articles influenced the coverage of stories, we found that the effect is present only for the hard news.”

In particular, we were thinking that there might be a relationship between the traffic that individual articles receive and how long stories and particular topics are covered in a newspaper Twitter. We tested this hypothesis using data from a large online version of a reputable Indian newspaper. We wanted to see if those stories whose first articles received a high number of clicks for various reasons were somehow covered for a longer period of time in the newspaper. We also tested various additional measures of resources that an editor might allocate to the story.

What we found was interesting. We indeed found that there is a relationship between the number of clicks that are received by the article and the amount of time that a story is essentially covered by follow-up articles that are repeating on multiple days. Those two are positively correlated.

Key Takeaways:
There are a couple key takeaways from our research. First, there is indeed a relationship that whenever a news article receives a higher number of clicks, there is a higher level of editorial resources allocated to the particular story. This is something that makes sense at a correlational level. But you would wonder, “To what extent is this relationship also causal?” What I mean by that is, to what extent is it the case that, just because a news story is receiving a higher number of clicks, you see a longer period of time that is allocated to it?...MORE

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