News by Popular Demand: A voting model of social media framing

CALVO, ERNESTO, ARUGUETE, NATALIA Y VENTURA, TIAGO

Boston

Congreso; APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition "Democracy and Its Discontents"; 2018

American Political Science Association

In an environment where readers react on real time to publications, how should editors decide the editorial line of their news organizations? In this article, we consider a model where readers ?vote? on social media by embedding links to traditional media and where journalists modify their news content to maximize readership. Following an extensive literature on spatial models of voting, we show that quality outlets should concentrate on salient issues and editorialize their news to approximate the ideological preferences of users who assign the highest reputation scores to its products. Low quality outlets, we show, are crowded out to more marginal ideological locations and to more marginal issues. Our results provide a general theory to describe how new technologies shape the editorial decisions of news organizations.