Journalists and readers on different conversations

A number of news companies release occasional or annual figures as to which of their stories have been most popular over a given period.

The most notorious of these was the Seattle Times, whose Danny Westneat at the end of 2005 ruefully admitted that not only was a story about a man having sex with a horse the most popular of the year, but that four of the Seattle Times’ top twenty stories that year covered the same horse sex story and that this was probably "the most widely read material this paper has published in its 109-year history".

The Seattle Times is not alone in discovering that its most prurient, trivial content is far and away its most popular. Slate made an essentially identical point, that "during 2005, Slate covered the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the future of the Supreme Court, but our most popular stories were, for the most part, about dogs, beer, celebrities, and naked ladies." TiVo now lets us make similar assessments (SearchViews) of the most popular – replayed – moments on TV, and the stats it released about the SuperBowl in February indicated that the most replayed moment from the whole event was a GoDaddy commercial “which featured a well-endowed woman losing her top at a public decency hearing.” Tampa Bays 10 echoes this; “what do some bad cheerleaders, Tom Cruise, fifteen strippers, a really ugly dog, a naughty teacher, Jessica Simpson, a Japanese Bra and a Python have in common?” in its review of the most popular ten stories of the year.

More extensive experiments into democratising the news have led to the effective tabloidisation of whole newspapers - Las Ultimas Noticias in Chile selects and orders stories for each day's print edition on the basis of the popularity of stories on the website (Editorsweblog) and has simply handed over the editorial process to its readers. Reporting in 2006 on this experiment that began in 2004, Editorsweblog reported that “Las Ultimas Noticias, a struggling top-end paper, began following stories based on the click-count they received on the paper's website. Stories that received many clicks were assigned reporters, and those with few were dropped. This strategy resulted in many fluff stories being covered and the paper became filled with celebrities and scantily clad girls.”

The Wisconsin State Journal has opted for a far less drastic version of the experiment, with editors selecting three or four stories each day for readers of the website to vote on to the front page of the next day’s newspaper. Editor Tim Kelley has therefore expressed confidence that his experiment wouldn't descend into a lowbrow free-for-all, commenting that “we aren't too worried that you'll be scribbling up our first draft of history with Paris Hilton's daily exploits” (and it would be mere cynicism to note that as I write “Porn stores: Coming to your neighborhood next?” appears to be winning today's Journal online poll by one vote to nil).

Perhaps Las Ultimas Noticias and the Seattle Times and Slate and Tampa Bays 10 and the TiVo figures from the SuperBowl are the exception rather than the rule. A number of news operations, including the New York Times, the Onion and Yahoo! News, provide “most emailed” or “most blogged” pages that are not mere catalogues of sexual misadventure. Yet these rarely seem to include "most clicked" stories, and unlike the Seattle Times' revelation only go back a few days or at least a month. It would be interesting to see what an annual review of the most viewed stories even on the New York Times might reveal about the real interests of its readers.

This week Tim Porter quoted approvingly from a speech by Chris Peck (PressThink), calling for news organisations to accept that “news will be generated by the people who are chosen, not the chosen people” and that “news will rely on the wisdom of the many, not the insight of the few, with journalists being knowledge leaders”. This is a familiar theme, and one that some of the wisest minds in journalism (Dan Gillmor, Steve Yelvington, Jay Rosen, Vin Crosbie and many others) have been putting forward for some time. I’m all in favour of utilising the wisdom of crowds. I’m all in favour of the news as conversation, of blogs and reader comments and wikis and the elusive goal of citizen journalism. But before we embrace all of that we need to look at the abundant readership data we have to hand and see just what it is the news as conversation will look like. If journalists fulfiling the lofty calling of the fourth estate want to have conversations about affairs of state, and readers idling away a lull in the working day want to have conversations about affairs with horses, we shouldn’t be too surprised that there isn’t yet a perfect understanding between newsrooms and their audiences.

Update: This question has since been addressed more comprehensively at the American Journalism Review.