News editors judgment vs. social media choices
[The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy](http://journalistsresource.org/) is a great resource for a number of things, including news and journalism.  [They've just featured a study](http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/digital-social-media-research-march-2014-gatekeeping-filter-bubbles-virality-sharing?utm~E95Esource=JR-email&utm~E95Emedium=email&utm~E95Ecampaign=JR-email) contrasting what news editors choose as news and what the selections that are seen on social media.  Oddly enough, there are no mentions of cats playing piano videos.  It seems that social media might be more demanding than editors when it comes to choosing news.  My reading is only a preliminary one, but my eye was caught by the line in the summary below: "Social media users tend to favor hard news over soft news."

The Center's summary of the report says:

“Shares, Pins and Tweets: News Readership From Daily Papers to Social Media”
From Duke University, published in Journalism Studies. By Marco Toledo Bastos.

Drawing two weeks of data from the New York Times’ and the Guardian’s APIs, as well as the APIs of various social media platforms, Bastos set out to answer an important question: How much overlap is there between what editors choose to focus on and what social media users grab on to? This revitalizes an old debate over editorial judgment, gatekeeping and norms of “newsworthiness.” The author looks at about 16,000 articles on the news sites from late 2012; he also analyzes article links circulated on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Delicious and StumbleUpon. Some raw data findings relating to links posted on social media prove interesting: Times articles earned an average of 39 retweets on Twitter and 445 shares on Facebook, while Guardian articles saw an average of 50 retweets and 190 Facebook shares.

Bastos concludes: “The results show that social media users express a preference for a subset of content and information that is at odds with the decisions of newspaper editors regarding which topic to emphasize.” Social media users tend to favor hard news over soft news, especially on Twitter. Only a quarter of the Times sports articles studied, for example, ever showed up on Twitter or Facebook. Likewise, news editors’ preferences for more articles about the economy do not track with social media user’s apparent preferences. Further, Bastos says, “although most news sections are uniformly and symmetrically distributed across newspapers and social networking sites, we found remarkable differences on the number of news items about arts, science, technology and opinion pieces, which are on average more frequent on social networking sites than on newspapers.” The variation may be partly explained by the more urban, educated and youthful characteristics of social media users, the study notes.