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I conduct research related to traditional and new media and in this study what we are interested in is
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documenting any sort of bias that might be happening in newspapers related to the availability of digital data and big
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data consumers often wonder what goes through an editor's mind when they look
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at newspapers how do the news that they read how do they make it to the newspaper or the TV that they watch and
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they often wonder are they selected based on some sort of particular agenda of the newspaper already sorted based on
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their importance now if you ask a journalist up until recently at least they would give you the answer that yes
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news are selected based on their news worthiness there's their importance and
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the novelty how important they are how new they are to the public however if this is the case of course consumers may
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also wonder why is it that we see so many cat pictures or hawise that we see so many quizzes that are available on
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the news media now we took an alternate approach to this we had an alternate hypothesis and we said but perhaps there
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are other concerns in editors mind especially these days when the editors are fed so much information about how
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the individual stories on online news articles are doing in particular we are thinking that there might be a
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relationship between in the traffic that individual articles receive and how long
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stories particular topics are covered on a newspaper so we tested this hypothesis
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using data from a large online version of a reputable newspaper outside of the United States was actually an Indian
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newspaper and we wanted to see if the stories who's first articles received a
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high number of clicks for various reasons if they somehow were covered for a longer period of time in the newspaper
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and we also tested various additional measures of resources that an editor might allocate to the story and what we
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found was interesting we indeed found that there is a relationship between the number of clicks that are
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saved by the article and the amount of time that a story is essentially covered by the follow-up articles that are
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repeating on multiple days those two are positively correlated well there are a couple key takeaways
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from our research first is of course this relationship that indeed whenever a news article receives higher number of
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clicks there is a higher level of resources in tutorial resources that are allocated to the particular story but
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this is of course something that makes sense at a correlational level you would wonder to what extent is this also
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causal the relationship what I mean by that is to what extent is it the case that just because new story is receiving
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higher number of clicks you see a longer period of time that's allocated to it so
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we had to establish this this was the the main effort that we exert exerted in our research what we did was to find
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some instruments as we call them that would affect essentially the amount of clicks that that are received by the
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article but not necessarily the editorial decision of how much time to allocate to it and the two instruments
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that we used were looking at reigns days with reigns and looking also at the ordinary power shortages so our idea is
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that if there is a rainy day people would be staying indoors they would be more likely to go online that is going
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to create some sort of a shock in the number of clicks similarly on the days when there are ordinary power shortages
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it's likely that the chances that people will go online is going to go down that's going to reduce the number of
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clicks in environment look at the relationship between clicks and these two instruments we find a significant
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relationship and whenever we looked at essentially the editorial policy related to these two instruments we are also
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seeing that indeed there is a relationship that we can see in terms of how long the coverage of a particular
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stories or also on how many follow-up articles appear related to a particular first story that was published what
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would that mean that might mean that if it happens to be a rainy day or if it happens to beat it in India if there was
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an ordinary power shortage on the day that Kim Kardashian article first broke that
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story actually may run for a couple more days on the newspaper as opposed to another story
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well the conclusion that surprised us the most was probably who once we started separating news into further
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classifications and and made a comparison among them so what we did as an addition was to analyze news as hard
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versus soft news what I mean by hard news is the type of news that tend to provide more information to the
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consumers for example news related to politics or business and by soft means soft news I mean news such as
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entertainment or sports when you looked at video traffic that's received by articles influence the coverage of
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stories by looking at only the hard news in the soft news we found that the effect is present only for the hard news
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it doesn't exist for the softness or to put it in more academic terms the effect
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is not significant so what this might imply is that consumers should not necessarily worry that just because now
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traffic information is provided to news editors and news editors tend to pay more attention to them it doesn't
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necessarily mean they'll start seeing newspapers full of cat pictures or more
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entertainment stories in addition we also found sort of we quantified the effects of the traffic so what we can
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say is for example increasing the new story clicks by about seven hundred klicks is going to result in about three
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additional days of coverage in the storage and that might also mean 3 additional articles on average about the
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same story about the same topic so that's the second fine so in terms of the news industry right
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now there's a lack of consensus in terms of what the newspapers should be doing
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and with the spit all of this digital data when we look at some newspapers walks calm is mentioned to be an example
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of this they tend to recommend their journalists to stay away from digital beta this is done in order to encourage
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them to come up with better stories newsworthy stories stories that matter for the society by me look at other
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examples gawker.com is mentioned to be an example of this these newspapers tend to provide some sort of an incentive for
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their journalists to create stories that can bring higher number of clicks usually these incentives are in the form
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of financial payments so there isn't really a consensus and it's not clear
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exactly what policy should be the right policy to embrace by the news industry or study I think shows what can happen
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or at least currently documenting what's happening in one large reputable portion
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of the news industry what we are telling the news editors is in some sense yes it
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might help to use the digital data as long as you're not using this in order
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to dilute the quality of information that the consumers are receiving and for the consumers I think we are telling
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them that they don't have to necessarily worry about the quality of information
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that they receive from newspapers digital data might still actually help them it can increase the number of
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stories that are informative in some sense or the coverage of the stories that are informative for policymakers
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this brings up other questions because the one other side of essentially driving at clicks driving your news is
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what happens to the representations of the minority views when the majority of clicks are received by the populations
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or the sub groups that are also in in larger portions in a society that might bring up some questions about we point
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diversity which is important from the perspective of FCC and they might need to start now asking
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some questions about what does this policy due to the viewpoint of some of the minority maybe groups in the society
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well technically our research is the first that's documenting the existence of bias that's coming from the traffic
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so in that sense we can't really make a comparison to form a research but we can
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say that we are providing in evidence of a bias that's in a different format and
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that is essentially their new just something that we are starting to see in newspapers as an additional form of
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traffic source twice while we are still conducting and carrying out further analysis to see if
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we can make additional statements about this type of research and we are getting
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lots of feedback from or from our scholars and also peers in the industry as far as following up with our research
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with the same research kotor i'm going to be following now on social media not
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just the traditional news media and we are going to look at other impacts other factors that might be influencing
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people's life now one particular study we are focusing on that's relevant but a
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very different topic is looking at politicians and three on social media and how that influences their chances of
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raising campaign donations you