Newspaper Editors vs the Crowd: On the Appropriateness of Front

Page News Selection

Arkaitz ZubiagaCity University of New York

SNOW 2013 – May 13, 2013

The front page is the showcase that might condition whether or not one buys the newspaper.

Either in vending machines...

...or in news stands

Editorial meetings

● Newspaper editors discuss to select the news that will be part of next day's front page.

Editorial meetings

● Newspaper editors discuss to select the news that will be part of next day's front page.

● But how efficient is this news selection so as to matching the interests of the audience?

Study

VS

Data

● Whole year of (2012) NYTimes newspaper stories [1]:– Stories both in front page and inside.

● Number of times each of these stories...– was tweeted.

– was posted on FB.

● [1] http://www.nytimes.com/pages/todayspaper/

Data

● For each story:– Category: nytimes.com/date/category/headline

– Part of front page: 0 or 1

– FB posts: #

– Tweets: #

Daily ranking

● For each day, check the overlap between:– Front page stories.

– Top stories on Twitter and Facebook.

Results

● Most popular story of the day on Twitter:– Appeared 147/366 times on the front page.

● Most popular story of the day on Facebook:– Appeared 73/366 times on the front page.

Results

Summarizing...

● Little overlap between front page news and top social news.

● While editors pick hard news for the front page, users are rather into softer news.

Thoughts

● It's hard to imagine front pages where news about science, technology, or fashion predominate.

● But would this “modernization” really help sell more newspapers when the daily circulation is declining?

Thoughts

● Recency of news: how many hours had past since the news broke?

● e.g., the Boston Marathon bombing ranked 7th the next day on Facebook, and wouldn't make the front page.

Live demo

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