Newspaper Editors vs the Crowd: On the Appropriateness of Front Page News Selection

Arkaitz Zubiaga

SNOW, WWW Workshop on Social News on the Web. 2013.

The front page is the showcase that might condition whether one buys a newspaper, and so editors carefully select the news of the day that they believe will attract as many readers as possible. Little is known about the extent to which editors? criteria for front page news selection are appropriate so as to matching the actual interests of the crowd. In this paper, we compare the news stories in The New York Times over the period of a year to their popularity on Twitter and Facebook. Our study questions the current news selection criteria, revealing that while editors focus on picking hard news such as politics for the front page, social media users are rather into soft news such as science and fashion.