davywavy | What the papers say.

What the papers say.

You'd think, given that amount of coverage of the News International phone hacking story in the press, that it was the biggest story of the year so far. A news monlith toppled and - maybe - the prime minister himself implicated and weakened.

You'd think.

The thing is, if there's one thing the press likes it's the news itself being the news. Being able to write about the internal workings of the press as the press and scrabbling for the moral high ground as they do so. They love it.
However, what the press reports and what people are actually interested in are often two different things, and I got me to wondering how to test what people are reading as opposed to what the papers think they should read. And then it came to me; the newspapers have their websites, and pretty much all of them have a 'most read' function.

The most obvious place to start is the UK's popular newspaper website, The Daily Telegraph, which gets more traffic than any other. At time of writing, the most popular stories on that site are:
1.Only Germany can save EMU as contagion turns systemic
2.Rupert Murdoch hit by custard pie: Wendi Deng's volleyball spike
3.Top Chinese gymnast found begging on the street
4.Return of the Gold Standard as world order unravels
5.Girls urged to strip to support Vladimir Putin as president

There are pages and pages about NI and Murdoch, but only one - the custard pie one - is particularly popular. Telegraph readers are seemingly more interested in the ongoing collapse of the EU and global economic woes, and Vladimir Putin getting some Russki stunnas to whop their norks out.
And why not?

But is this the same across every paper? What of the UK's most read print newspaper, The Sun? Their website leads with Murdoch, same as everyone else, but what are the most popular stories on their website this morning?
1: Behave or else (A story about Chelsea FC)
2: What's that curling up by the hill .. is it a monster? (A dead sea monster is found on a beach)
3: Forgotten something, Rihanna? (Pop star in no undies shocker)
4: Sexy Sacha Parkinson makes a splash (Actress in bikini not shocker)
5: Rupert Murdoch attacked at phone hacking inquiry

So, the only bit of the Murdoch story people are interested in there is the custard pie again. Is a pattern developing? What of the Daily Express?

1: Pair told to pay £110k ...because neighbour took over their land
2: Britain must ban migrants
3: EU plots to control Britain’s military forces
4: Children win slice of bigamy duke’s riches
5: ‘Sick’ Shrien Dewani may be faking to avoid trial, admits expert
6: Dressing down for the Lord’s ladies

Turns out they aren't interested in Murdoch at all.

Tell you what. The Times. The most famous paper in the world. Serious minded, and straight to the point. Surely their readers are mad keen to know about the ongoing furore at News international?

1: As it happened: the phone hacking committees
2: Teenager ‘murdered his parents, then held party’
3: Whistleblower gets £16,000 to keep quiet on ‘falsified’ rail…
4: The gluten-free loaf at £32.27 each that is free to patients…
5: Cheat your way to a bikini body

Oh. Well, at least the custard pie story got them interested.

The BBC, then. The BBC has been mad keen to go after Murdoch on the basis that he's been jolly successful at selling people things they actually want, rather than relying on a business model which involves charging people whether they want something or not. Jeremy Paxman got a bit of a shock last week when BBC cameras went out to interview ordinary members of the public and discovered that the ordinary members of the public weren't overly interested in the story and instead just wanted to get on with their lives.
Still, the BBC thinks this is important and certainly their site is crammed with Murdoch and News International stories, but what are people reading on there this morning?

1: Woman arrested over saline deaths
2: Teen 'killed parents, held party'
3: 50 of your noted Americanisms
4: The shuttle's successors
5: Boat death girl, 11, 'not seen'

Turns out their readers aren't as interested in this story as the BBC seems to think they ought to be.

Right then. The Guardian. Nobody much reads the Guardian, but they've led the crusade against NI, and their readers have been the most shrill in denouncing the evils of Rupert Murdoch. Surely, surely their readers are interested in the story. It beggars belief that the readers of The Guardian could find stories about sharks and football players more interesting than stories about their bete noir?

1: Science: The NFL star and the brain injuries that destroyed him
2. Media: Wendi Deng's Charlie's Angel moment boosts husband's image
3. News: Great white shark jumps from sea into research boat
4. Media: Behind Rupert and James Murdoch's gloss, an intensely serious defence
5. Media: News International 'deliberately' blocked investigation

Oh.

Okay. Apart from the unedifying spectacle of an octagenarian being slapped in the face with a custard pie in the mother of parliaments, it seems that nobody is much interested in this story any more. Only the Guardian - the UK's lowest-circulation national paper - gets more than one story about this into their most read, and even their readers are less interested in it than stories about the NFL(!) and sharks.

There's a moral there, if you look for it.

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Given that a lot of people start their daily news feed with either the radio or the TV I'm not actually surprised by this result. What this could prove is that rather than people being bored by this story they are getting the daily update on it first thing and then moving onto other stories once they get to work as they have already had their fix.

As evidence to support this I would offer the heavy coverage on the commercial TV news channels, those stations are a lot more market sensitive and always focus on hot topics (least they lose their ad revenue) so their continued coverage of the story suggests that people are finding it interesting.

I'd also check out the news papers headlines as those are what get people to pick up the paper. If the print media are still offering it as the leader then it means people are still finding that story either interesting or something that they think they should be interested in. Given the cut-throat nature of the press if someone was able to get an edge by running the not-murdoch story then they would and then everyone would be all over that.

Whilst I don't dispute that people are finding it a drone now (the news of the pie went around the office like wild-fire whilst actual substance statements are hardly known) I think you've discovered the difference in reading habits on websites rather than any solid 'people don't give a shit'

You're missing another implication of the research - that the NFL story on the Guardian website demonstrates just how much of their traffic comes from overseas and so isn't representative as a sample in my argument.

C'mon, dude, market research 101 :)

or that guardian readers like stories about contact sports injuring rich sports star

62% of their site traffic is non-UK. C'mon.

curse your stats, one day my baseless theories will defeat you! (and I still think Guardian readers enjoy reading about the perils of contact sports)

Due to being too soft and weedy themselves ever to take part in them directly?

Nice article - and good research.

To paraphrase Buchner, "The media are like Saturn - they eat their own children".

And to bugger about with Baudrillard, the media these days seem quite hysterical in their insistence that there are people out there actually *listening*, rather than going about their lives, eating, drinking, watching X Factor and Eastenders and Doctor Who while the media drone on endlessly in the background. So much so, in fact, that the media have actually succeeded in "simulating" an audience. It's like talking to a darkened silent auditorium - they're never quite sure anyone's out there, but they have to assume there is, and so they imagine Joe and Jane Media-Consumer, and preach to them. All utterly self-referential and in constant danger of disappearing up its own jacksie with a dreadful schlupping sound.

Most people who are bothered won't be bothered with the distraction of the phonehacking circus. Most people who aren't bothered won't care either way.

Me, I'm interested in *why* this circus has erupted right now. Is it just to distract us from the economic collapse and the looming war with Iran - the "war to solve our economic woes"? Or is it a symptom of a deeper conflict - some bizarre revenge attack by the pro-Euro lobby for the pro-dollar lobby's takedown of DSK? Or has Murderoch just accumulated too much STUFF, and it's time to tear him apart and share it all out again?

I haven't the foggiest. Which is pretty rare for li'l ol' opinionated me lol :-D

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What exactly is going on with the NHS at the moment, to pick one random being-smoke-screened possibility?

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I believe a man has already been taken into custardy

H

Keep this up and I'll give the pair of you a pastry-ing.

I'm assuming you spent some of your not inconsiderately valuable time researching this. I am curious what the point was?

I'm interested in how the world and people actually work, not how people tell me they work. So I try to find out.

Right.

Interestingly though, this research doesn't take into account a few things.

Demographic - If the parliament stuff is being read by a few hugely important decision makers and influential people, the fact that more are reading about a begging athlete might not matter that much. (Not quite against what you're saying, but I think important to remember)

Over saturation - If there are 10 pages on this story and only one on the space shuttle, it's possible that people are reading more about this story than anything else while still not trending in the top 5.

Bias - The guardian is probably the least Murdock friendly thing on that list (despite NI claims of how bad the BBC is) and I think it's no surprise that the readers there have hit the Murdock thing more often than the other ones listed. On the other side of the coin you've listed the Times and the Sun, both of which have put forward a *very* different slant on this whole thing than most other sources. (Wonder why...) I remember when this all kicked off struggling to find any mention of it on the Suns web site, eventually having to scroll 2 3rds down the front page to find a link.

Though don't get me wrong, I do think that a lot of people do forget to look outside of the central London circle in many, many matters.

The Guardian thing is consistent with my point; only a very small number of people as a proportion of the population are actually that bothered. There's been suggestions that Cameron may not survive this, but the evidence is that he will because no matter what the papers are saying, not enough people care about this to unseat him - a bit like when Bernie Ecclestone paid off Blair.
You may remember when it was hard to find this on the Sun or the Time, but it was the splash lead on both their websites today when the data was gathered.

Most people were shocked by the hacking of dead kids and squaddies, but that story is ow effectively closed. The general populace don't give two beans about Andy Coulson, or even know or care who he is. The story is over, but the media does like it when the media is the story, don't they? it makes them feel important.

Kind of interesting what the different readerships go for, isn't it?

Telegraph - collapse of global economy, topless Russian chicks, custard pie story.
Sun - footie, topless chicks, custard pie story.
Express - nothing anyone has ever heard of.
Times - custard pie story, teen killer, diet features.
Grauniad - custard pie story, Murdoch, jumping shark

If you relied on only one newspaper you'd hardly know you were living on the same day as readers of other papers. Other than the custard pie story obviously. Still ... the statistics don't lie.

H

Plainly, custard pies are the glue which brings humanity together as one.

Ten bob to the first person to get Gordon Brown with one.

I mostly followed this through video links (which would appear on the bbc as 'most watched/listened' rather than 'most read' and twitter, which has been utterly abuzz with news about the phone hacking scandal, under the tags #hackgate or #notw. I don't think I've read articles about it at all. However, I have chatted extensively about it with people on LJ and on IRC.
I mean heck, I've even watched BBC Parliament to get more news on this story, for crying out loud.

In other words, I think you're looking in the wrong places. I mean yes, I've read articles in newspapers, but they've been about silly or momentarily interesting things and not about this scandal. I'm getting the scandal live as it happens, so I don't need summaries.

Okay, from the BBC news page *right now*:

Most read stories across all sections
Bond actress died drinking acid
50 of your noted Americanisms
Nurse arrested over saline deaths
The re-rise of the acquaintance
The shuttle's successors
Most watched video across all sections
'I had my bladder removed'
Waterfalls flow upwards in high winds
WWII mine detonated safely at sea
Cameron defends decision to hire Coulson
'Cheer up, the worst is yet to come'

Yeah, but if you looked only at the articles I'd read in the past twenty four hours, you'd assume that I wasn't interested either - because I haven't had my news on the phone-hacking scandal from articles. I got my information on that particular story from Twitter and discussed it on LJ and IRC.

What I am saying is, if you checked Twitter trends, television news viewing figures and 'most watched/listened' on the BBC for yesterday, you'd see a lot more interest in this story than you will from articles, because articles are not where people are learning about this.

What else I am saying is that your article check is like trying to find out what people spend their money on purely by checking their supermarket receipts, then concluding that almost no one has any interest in reading books.

I'd agree with your supermarket example completely, given that tesco is a book retailer; what I'd conclude from looking at peoples supermarket receipts coming out of tesco is that there's a certain amount of interest in reading books, but nothing like as much as there is in food and drink. A good example.

To put it another way: across the population, how many people have more shelf space devoted to books than food? A small, self- selecting and self-reinforcing group do, but the vast majority don't.

I think the only way to be sure would be with a proper poll and decent statistical sampling. You have a good point about the number of twitter accounts compared to online newspaper readers.

Twitter I find harder tomcomment on, as neither I nor many of my immediate social circle use it. However, the most recent figures I can find suggest that there are 5.5m users in the uk. How many posting on one subject does it take to get a subject trending? I don't know. However, given that the total number of uk twitter users (including inactive and business accounts) is smaller than the combined daily audiences of the media I list above, I'm not sure that a direct comparison of audience validity is possible?

Sorry for lack of formatting - copypaste isn't easy on the iPhone. However, of the five most watched stories, only one (coulson) is related, and that's less popular than a story about someone losing their bladder (watch me not make a taking the piss joke. Oh.)

I think my point stands; the people who think the nation is as interested in this as they are are overestimating how much most people care.

I really enjoyed your analysis but I think there are some other important factors that need to be considered

Presentation of Issues

Your disregarding the 'presentation' of articles in a websites layout, since design will play at least a minimum some role in the stories that users click on, for instance I looked up The Guardian website and the NFL story was the largest there and was put in a 'major feature/investigative piece' area of the site. This 'noise' needs to be normalised, by analogy, if only print, to use a simple example to illustrate, the stories would need to be printed on stark A4 and laid out evenly in front of the reader , since this will eliminate the problem of 'presentation' and would yield a more representative result of actual 'interest', I'm pretty sure if in this example one would put a simple coloured border (or even an arrow pointing to it, which is essentially what presentation is about) around one of the A4 sheets it would result in a rise in interest in that story.

Implicit Assumptions

1. Your assuming that people read a political story and an entertainment story for the same reasons/motives. I'd say that entertainment does play some role in political stories but their immediate role is to inform as opposed to entertain. To illustrate, am I choosing the 'Rhianna no underwear' article to be informed (politically) or to be entertained?

2. Your also assuming that the media's main role is to give the consumer exactly what it wants, which if viewed through the prism of microeconomic theory is fine, but one needs to be aware that these assumptions are based on abstract models that need to be 'filled out' in practise with other considerations. If one regards the media as the '4th estate', it is not only there to 'entertain' but also has a role to (at least attempt) to make people aware of 'important/significant' issues and inform them. Following on from this, if we take Britain's most popular newspaper The Sun, which is primarily focused on entertainment (showbiz) stories, would an electorate who based their preferences solely on this source be informed enough to make an adequate decision?

3. You need to factor in some variable that takes into account the general apathy level of readers interest in political stories, then can you best measure how (un)popular political stories are.

4. Very different demographies get their news from the internet, even if your conclusion holds, it only applies to this distinct demo, those who get their news groom broadcast of print media may yield different results.

5. Lastly your assuming that interest in news items is constant, whereas in fact the electorate becomes significantly more interested in political stories closer to and around an election when they are attempting to gather information to make an informed choice.

Taking your logic to the extreme, if one had a website with two stories, one on the Somali famine and one on 'cute kittens', if the 2nd topic trended higher would you infer that the sample was not 'interested' in famine? If so does that mean it shouldn't be covered?

Well, it's always interesting to get replies which appear to have taken longer to write than my original post - especially from people who appear to have created an account in order to reply to me.

The criticisms of the methodology might or might not be valid (I started to write a response to each point in turn, but it turned out life was too short), but my purpose was to show a snapshot of mass media to illustrate a point. Y'see my social media over the last few weeks has been dominated by people rattling on about the whole NI thing, but it struck me the other day that that domination was caused by a small number of people posting a lot about it rather than lots of people showing an interest. My political philosophy is based on the assumption that most people just want leaving alone to get on with their lives, and so I wanted to look at whether the vocal anti-Murdoch crowd were repreentative, or if the small proportion of noisy people was reflected in the media the wider population were accessing. As a snapshot of the most widely accessed media at a peak time of the day (when people have got to work, logged on and checked thenews), I felt it served interesting and valid illustrative purposers to the small no. of people who think that this is still of immediate mass concern, and I claim no more of it.

Taking your logic to the extreme, if one had a website with two stories, one on the Somali famine and one on 'cute kittens', if the 2nd topic trended higher would you infer that the sample was not 'interested' in famine? If so does that mean it shouldn't be covered?

Yes, I would take that to mean that people are more interested in kittens than famine. Thats because the vast majority of the population are more interested in kittens than famine.
However, I don't say that it shouldn't be reported, so don't put words in my mouth.

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What the papers say.

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What the papers say.

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