Diverging Engagement Patterns with Hard and Soft News in Spain

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Santi Urrutia, whose focus is on the Spanish news aggregator Menéame. This platform is somewhat similar to Reddit; it was launched in 2005, and has some 9 million unique users per month. It enables the sharing of links as well as the up- and downvoting of such posts, as well as follow-up comments, with the ultimate aim of having such posts appear on the front page of the site.

This enables a study of which news stories and categories (e.g. hard or soft content) receive the most comments or click-throughs. The project examined some 51,000 news items that appeared on the front page of the site during 2011-15, from which the researchers sampled some 3,700 news articles. These were coded for 14 story categories, and examined for patterns in engagement.

This found that soft news categories (other, society, culture) received the greatest number of clicks from users of the site. Hard news stories were comparatively less frequently visited, with an average difference of almost 4,000 click-through between them. However, hard news categories (education, politics, violence against women) received a substantially larger average number of comments – comments and click-throughs are moderately inversely related.

This might indicate the diverging interests of users of the site. It also holds some lessons for journalists – to chase only clicks or comments on their stories may cater only to one part of their audience.