Abstract

This thesis discusses the common assumption that the quantity of pageviews a news article gets is proportional to the audience’s interest in its topic. It proposes instead that the decision to click on a headline is directly proportional to the interest in the topic it suggests, and inversely proportional to the cognitive effort required to find a personal context in which the expected information is likely to be useful. The theoretical linkage between these three concepts is established by the application of Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) Relevance Theory. The validity of the hypothesis is discussed by fitting the observations made by Kormelink and Meijer (2018) regarding audience members’ rationales for clicking or not clicking on a news article, and by Boczkowski and Mitchelstein (2013) regarding the gap between editors’ and audiences’ content choices. It also suggests further applications of Relevance Theory in Journalism Studies, particularly concerning the development of metrics and key performance indicators for news analytics.