Clay Shirky posted a somewhat lengthy response to the Confidence Game essay published by Dean Starkman – and in his response you find the following very interesting set of paragraphs that relate to front page programming for Editors:

Institutions reduce the choices available to their members. (This is Ronald Coase’s famous argument about transaction costs.) This reduction allows better focus on the remaining choices they face.

The editors meet every afternoon to discuss the front page. They have to decide whether to put the Mayor’s gaffe there or in Metro, whether to run the picture of the accused murderer or the kids running in the fountain, whether to put the Biker Grandma story above or below the fold. Here are some choices they don’t have to make at that meeting: Whether to have headlines. Whether to be a tabloid or a broadsheet. Whether to replace the entire front page with a single ad. Whether to drop the whole news-coverage thing and start selling ice cream.

Every such meeting, in other words, involves a thousand choices, but not a billion, because most of the big choices have already been made. These frozen choices are what gives institutions their vitality — they are in fact what make them institutions. Freed of the twin dangers of navel-gazing and random walks, an institution can concentrate its efforts on some persistent, medium-sized, and tractable problem, working at a scale and longevity unavailable to its individual participants.

All fair arguments (emphasis is mine) and very much in line with our thinking at Visual Revenue. Institutions reducing choice materializes in such procedures as Editors agreeing upfront about some articles not being eligible for front page exposure. This could be as simple as the publisher deciding that Articles older than 4 hours cannot be shown in the Hero Spot, that only 2 sports articles can be above the fold at any point in time, or that 60% of the Articles must be from the region of their primary constituents. This type of choice reduction is realized by having us ask Editor’s to outline their Editorial Tone as a set of Persistent Editorial Instructions.

However, the state of affairs is still one of astronomical choice, where the initial limitation of choices, in the online news media industry, still leave you with an inhumanely amount of possible front page layouts. Unfortunately not thousands of choices, as Mr. Shirky so kindly suggest.

In conclusion;
Modern newsrooms either need to reduce choices so dramatically that a human editor can easily and timely decide how to program the front page, or the organization must deploy technology that help reduce choice and calculate best performing outcomes within an editorial framework. This is all we do at Visual Revenue!

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)