• NPR, Thursday, July 10, 2014 12:43 PM

Like a number of ad agencies, Google set up a “newsroom” to monitor buzz around the World Cup, and turn trending topics and stories into viral content. Invited to sit in on the action, NPR’s Aarti Shahani was struck by the newsroom’s tendency to consciously ignore negative themes. “In old-school newsrooms, the saying goes: if it bleeds, it leads,” Shahani notes. Yet, “because this new newsroom is focused on getting content onto everyone's smartphone, [mobile marketing expert Rakesh Agrawal] says, editors may have another bias: to comb through the big data in search of happy thoughts.”
 

Read the whole story at NPR »