Classifying the News: Metadata as Structures of Visibility and Compliance with Tech Standards

Metadata tags are key to visibility in today’s datafied world as they organize news articles through meta-information that allows news to be recognized by algorithms and disseminated across the web. For the news media, this means that news must be classified according to predefined categories. This chapter examines metatags of 260 European news websites and determines the extent to which they apply metatags that allow webpages to be featured in Google search results. Furthermore, the chapter examines how media organizations are compliant with the metadata library of Schema.org, which is organized by, among others, Yandex, Google and the World Wide Web Consortium. While a majority of media are compliant with Google and Schema.org libraries, only a few large organizations utilize these to the full extent. Finally, the chapter discusses the impact for mediated public formation in the context of access to information via the news delivered through search engines.