"Jaha, nu har en halv miljon människor varit inne och tittat på fisken" : Journalisters tankar om att anpassa sig efter klick

Sammanfattning: Computational techniques have transformed the journalistic approach. Journalists now have the opportunity to integrate user-statistics from the news website with their work. Singer (2011) argues that journalists seem particularly afraid of items, which they perceive as trivial or otherwise unsavory, will prove popular - potentially creating management pressures to produce more of those stories. She describes this practice as ‘‘traffic whoring’’. This phenomenon could affect journalists democratic function and their public responsibility. Through qualitative interviews we seek to answer the question: how do journalist perceive traffic whoring and how does it affect their journalistic work? Our study reveals that the interviewed journalists don’t consider themselves to be influenced by traffic whoring. On the contrary, their given statements describes the opposite. Partly due to the visibility of user-preferences, but also due to an increasing management demand to generate high numbers and statistics.