Browsing by Author "Zhang, Jiehua"

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    The Force of Popularity: a Study of Audience Metrics' Impacts on News Content
    (University of Alabama Libraries, 2022) Zhang, Jiehua; Barnidge, Matthew; University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
    With the world marching into the digital age, the newsroom underwent dramatic changes. One of the most significant technological innovations is audience metrics, which provide journalists with detailed and timely information about the audience and pageviews. The widespread adoption of audience metrics in newsrooms has raised concerns about editorial independence since journalists were found to allow pageviews to guide their news decisions. The financial uncertainties faced by commercial news organizations made the practice even more prevalent. The primary purpose of the research is to investigate the extent to which the audience’s clicks or story popularity influenced news prominence and to understand the implications of the practice to journalism’s social responsibilities. The study relied on two-phase content analysis of news stories published by six major newspapers in the U.S. and adopted innovative operationalization of popularity through a supervised machine learning process. The results showed that popularity had demonstrated strong and consistent impacts on story placement. Popularity itself is the prime predictor of story prominence, and it also moderates relationships between some news values and prominence. The findings suggest that the force of the audience might outweigh the power of journalistic standards and ethics, prompting journalists to promote news stories that readers want to read instead of those they need to read to participate in politics.