Newspaper Editors vs Crowd: Little Overlap Between Front Page News and Top Social Stories
1. Newspaper Editors vs the Crowd:
On the Appropriateness of Front
Page News Selection
Arkaitz Zubiaga
City University of New York
SNOW 2013 – May 13, 2013
2.
3. The front page is the
showcase that might
condition whether or not one
buys the newspaper.
7. 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?
9. 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/
10. Data
● For each story:
– Category: nytimes.com/date/category/headline
– Part of front page: 0 or 1
– FB posts: #
– Tweets: #
11. Daily ranking
● For each day, check the overlap between:
– Front page stories.
– Top stories on Twitter and Facebook.
12. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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?
18. 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.
