Is the NY Times ranking its stories by "popularity" as they say, or as this writer suggests, what's "interesting"? posted by lowblow (3 comments total)
I don't understand your question. I guess you're referring to this excerpt:
Would you want a ranking of the top 25 interesting stories? If so, good news. In a weird way, the NY Times is now doing this, ranking the 25 by the frequency that people e-mail the stories to each other.
Aren't people e-mailing these stories to each other because they're interesting? posted by pnevares at 4:11 PM on June 6, 2001
As does Yahoo (most e-mailed, as well as most-viewed).
Funny he notes that Maureen Dowd's column is "popular". No doubt a good many of those e-mailers are Free Republic types sending it with the Subject: line reading [BARF ALERT] ... which just goes to show that you can't always draw the obvious conclusion from a stat.
At Yahoo, f'rinstance, the most popular "news" photo is almost always a pretty woman (today she's wearing a bikini). If editorial decisions were based on this stat, Yahoo would become like British tabloids and their Page Three girls.
Anyway, this Eriq fellow is a little green, and I don't mean his background color, if he's only recently discovered these rankings and Google's backwards-links features. posted by dhartung at 4:31 PM on June 6, 2001
« Older
No women on Mars....
| "A fifth-grader was taken from...
Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Subscribe
Would you want a ranking of the top 25 interesting stories? If so, good news. In a weird way, the NY Times is now doing this, ranking the 25 by the frequency that people e-mail the stories to each other.
Aren't people e-mailing these stories to each other because they're interesting?
posted by pnevares at 4:11 PM on June 6, 2001