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Measuring popularity

Because digital technology allows publishers to keep track of everything that happens on a site, other measurements are gaining prominence too. Stories that are most blogged about is one popularity index that's being put on display more frequently. Another, from the ljworld.com site shows which stories are drawing the most comments.

It's all a means for traditional, editor-driven news sites to also allow their readers some say in matters of news judgment, without turning the site over to them as at, say, reader-ranked news site Digg.com. And it brings to the surface some stories that site managers wearing the hairshirt of hard news might otherwise deem unworthy of prominent display.

"Sometimes the most pure sense of what people are interested in is the `most e-mailed story,'" says Dave Toplikar, online editor at ljworld.com. There's an implicit suggestion of a deeper level of interest.

More than that, he says, it can help editors get outside of their own heads. "A lot of times as journalists we have ideas what we think is the most important. Then you get on the sites and you see, `Oh, this is what people are really most interested in. This is the water-cooler stuff,'" Toplikar said.

The number of times a most e-mailed story gets forwarded is minuscule compared with how many times a popular story is read:June's most e-mailed story on chicagotribune.com, on a coming nude cycling event, was sent around less than 700 times, while a popular story can be read 100,000 times or more. But the relative level of e-mailing still may, on occasion, affect how a story is displayed on the Web page.

"We all may think that one particular story was of interest," Toplikar said. "Then we look and see nobody's commenting on it. Nobody's mailing it. Maybe people just don't care as much as we, as journalists, do. Maybe we should move it down a notch."