Online news audiences: the challenges of web metrics

Online audience tracking technologies create an unprecedented opportunity for the media to collect natural, real-time data on what users do, and do not do, with news products. These user metrics have begun to shape editorial decisions and development strategies in newsrooms around the world. This chapter reviews this industrial trend and the challenges that web metrics present to journalism. It argues that these challenges, if not calmly addressed, could deepen an already critical crisis – the dumbing down of news – and bring newsroom tensions and conflicts to a new height. Journalists need to foster a stronger professional culture that helps them to take confidence and pride in their autonomous news judgement and to resist, wherever necessary, the sentiment of the crowd

One-skeleton galleries and cell combinatorics in type A

We describe the image of a cell in the Bialynicki-Birula decomposition of Gaussent and Littelmann's Bott-Samelson type variety, which is a desingularization of an affine Schubert variety, in type A for two particular cases. In the first case, we take a one-skeleton gallery, which is completely included in the dominant Weyl chamber. We can show, that the closure of the image of the cells associated to galleries, that belong to certain parts of the associated crystal, are in fact MV-cycles. In the second case we take a gallery of type N\omega_1, which is completely included in the dominant Weyl chamber. We generalize the notion of a Young tableau and use the 1:1 correspondance between tableaux and one-skeleton galleries to analyze, how the associated cells behave under the bumping algorithm. Finally, we can show that if and only if we take two words, equivalent under the Knuth relations, then the closure of the images of the cells associated to the galleries coming from these word, are the same. In addition, this closure is an MV-cycle. This allows a geometric interpretation of the combinatoric Knuth relations in the plactic monoid