Users' reading habits in online news portals

The aim of this study is to survey reading habits of users of an online news portal. The assumption motivating this study is that insight into the reading habits of users can be helpful to design better news recommendation systems. We estimated the transition probabilities that users who read an article of one news category will move to read an article of another (not necessarily distinct) news category. For this, we analyzed the users' click behavior within plista data set. Key findings are the popularity of category local, loyalty of readers to the same category, observing similar results when addressing enforced click streams, and the case that click behavior is highly influenced by the news category

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

Breaking the News: First Impressions Matter on Online News

A growing number of people are changing the way they consume news, replacing the traditional physical newspapers and magazines by their virtual online versions or/and weblogs. The interactivity and immediacy present in online news are changing the way news are being produced and exposed by media corporations. News websites have to create effective strategies to catch people's attention and attract their clicks. In this paper we investigate possible strategies used by online news corporations in the design of their news headlines. We analyze the content of 69,907 headlines produced by four major global media corporations during a minimum of eight consecutive months in 2014. In order to discover strategies that could be used to attract clicks, we extracted features from the text of the news headlines related to the sentiment polarity of the headline. We discovered that the sentiment of the headline is strongly related to the popularity of the news and also with the dynamics of the posted comments on that particular news.Comment: The paper appears in ICWSM 201

Echoes of Populism and Terrorism in Libya’s Online News Reporting

This article focuses on news reporting in Libya, assessing both official and citizen journalism. Special attention is paid to online resources, primarily spontaneous posts written in Arabic. Social media shows the emergence of citizen journalism together with so-called User-generated Content. Both have proved capable of creating legitimacy. Political inclinations, including Islamic ideology and its religious claims, are presented, supported, or criticized by ordinary citizens who post their comments and opinions on the web. Official press and news agencies have their social media profiles as well, sharing the same online space with nonprofessionals. Monitoring and analysis of reporting show that there is no relevant difference in journalistic models; nor do concerns between professionals and nonprofessionals vary. Libya appears today to be a mosaic of different interests: one that is interconnected and in conflict at the same time. These interests are vying to establish new supremacies in the country. Journalism in its various typologies faces pressure from the abovementioned interests, so it is negatively affected by rhetoric in both reporting and commentary. These preliminary arguments lead us to the core topics of populism – for which a definition is suggested – and reporting about terrorism in Libya. Against this background, we analyze news flows, sources, and other issues. I conclude with a brief review of the main issues, the characteristics of the Arabic narrative discourse, and the emerging Arabic lexico

Stop Clickbait: Detecting and Preventing Clickbaits in Online News Media

Most of the online news media outlets rely heavily on the revenues generated from the clicks made by their readers, and due to the presence of numerous such outlets, they need to compete with each other for reader attention. To attract the readers to click on an article and subsequently visit the media site, the outlets often come up with catchy headlines accompanying the article links, which lure the readers to click on the link. Such headlines are known as Clickbaits. While these baits may trick the readers into clicking, in the long run, clickbaits usually don't live up to the expectation of the readers, and leave them disappointed. In this work, we attempt to automatically detect clickbaits and then build a browser extension which warns the readers of different media sites about the possibility of being baited by such headlines. The extension also offers each reader an option to block clickbaits she doesn't want to see. Then, using such reader choices, the extension automatically blocks similar clickbaits during her future visits. We run extensive offline and online experiments across multiple media sites and find that the proposed clickbait detection and the personalized blocking approaches perform very well achieving 93% accuracy in detecting and 89% accuracy in blocking clickbaits.Comment: 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM

A comparative study of online news retrieval and presentation strategies

We introduce a news retrieval system on which we evaluated three alternative presentation strategies for online news retrieval. We used a user-oriented and task-oriented evaluation framework. The interfaces studied were Image, giving a grid of thumbnails for each story together with query-based summaries presented as tooltips, Summary, which displayed the summary information alongside each thumbnail, and Cluster, which grouped similar stories together and used the same display format as Image. The evaluation showed that the Summary Interface was preferred to the Image Interface, and that the Cluster Interface was helpful to users with a set task to complete. The implications of this study are also discussed in this paper