The Life and Death of Political News

The rapid development of online media as a major location for news consumption has stimulated a variety of debates about how journalism is changing in the Internet era. Of particular importance have been worries about a potential turn toward populism, whereby journalists and editors shift away from reporting what is newsworthy to what their audience wants to hear supported by the widespread availability of audience metrics. A wealth of ethnographic research has pointed to the potential importance of such statistics; but little quantitative work has been conducted to test for the existence of a relationship between audience behavior and editorial decisions. This study seeks to fill that gap. Based on a novel data set of over 40,000 articles published in five major UK news outlets over a period of 6 weeks, we explore the relationship between a news story’s readership and its likelihood of being removed from the front page, based on the “most read” lists common to many news websites. We find that being a most read article decreased the short-term likelihood of being removed from the front page by around 25% and that this effect was broadly similar for both political and entertainment news. Surprisingly, we find a considerably greater influence in “quality” publications than their tabloid counterparts. Our results are discussed as evidence of a still limited, but potentially developing, turn toward online populism.