Why Audiences Hate Hard News—And Love Pretending Otherwise

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/news-kim-kardashian-kanye-west-benghazi/372906/

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You may not realize this, but we can see you. Yes, you. The human reading this article. We have analytics that tells us roughly where you are, what site you've just arrived from, how long you stay, how far you read, where you hop to next. We've got eyeballs on your eyeballs.

Why is it so important that digital news organizations track which articles you're reading on our websites? The obvious answer is that it teaches us what you're interested in. The less-obvious, but equally true, answer is that it teaches you what you're interested in.

If we merely asked what you wanted, without measuring what you wanted, you'd just keep lying to us—and to yourself.

Here's what I mean by lying. This year, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism asked thousands of people around the world what sort of news was most important to them. The graph below shows the responses from Americans. International news crushed celebrity and "fun" news by a margin of two-to-one. Economic and political news finished even higher.