Ananya Sen, Carnegie Mellon University, and Pinar Yildirim, Assistant Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School
Ideas for India, May 2015
Abstract: Identifying whether newspaper editors focus on what is “newsworthy” or what is “trendy” when choosing stories is important for the design of media regulation. This column shows how the popularity of an article, reflected by online clicks, influences the coverage of the story. However, this strategy operates differently for ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ news and hence, does not lead to a general decline of the quality of content.
