Who sets the news agenda is an age-old debate in journalism, and thanks to ever sophisticated algorithms that chart readers’ behaviour, in content-marketing too.

The Press Gazette reports a bold move by the Independent, which has launched i100, a picture-led news page where stories of the day are voted up the running order by readers. The result is that the most popular content appears at the top of the page.

The Independent’s digital editor Christian Broughton told the Press Gazette: “We have people who stare at analytics screens all day long and work out what stories people are engaging with most, and they tend to put those at the top. And I just thought, well if we’re going to put people in charge, let’s really put [them] in charge. I think it really empowers readers.”

The result so far looks like a Buzzfeed-cum-Reddit list of stories. However, the crucial difference to these sites is that i100 content is written by a team of Indy journalists and users can only vote on the stories that have already been provided.

For content-marketers, i100 raises an interesting question: dare you ignore data about what your audience actually reads and instead curate content based on what they say they like? That might sound like the same thing, but the rise of behavioural science suggests what people say and what people do often diverge. For instance, a person who tweets about high-brow stories may in fact get most of their news from low-brow sources. Therefore, should a company embarking on a content strategy go by data about an audience’s behaviour, or by what that audience says it wants to read.

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