Attention for Attention Hotspots: Exploring the Newsworthiness of Public Response in the Metric Society

Abstract

ABSTRACT News value research assumes that news factors may shift and diversify over time. Despite the technological and economic transformations of the media over the past decades, however, there has been little conceptual work on how journalistic news factors might be changing. This paper addresses how broader developments, such as digitization, datafication, and audience fragmentation, lead to changing news practices. One characteristic of the digital age is that attention is not only scarce and increasingly contested but also continuously measured and compared, leading to a heightened value around everything that seems to draw an exceptional response. Therefore, we introduce the news factor “public response” and argue that journalism increasingly covers those issues and actors that (are said to) have received broad or unexpected public attention. Using numerical, linguistic, and visual means, journalists explicitly tell their audience what many people are paying attention to. We demonstrate the significance of this news factor by pursuing two objectives: First, public response is presented conceptually and distinguished from other news factors. Second, we use the case of the 2016 US election campaign coverage to illustrate public response and derive suggestions for future measurements in qualitative and quantitative textual and visual content analysis.