Interesting piece in The New York Times about how top US newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, are balancing the use of traffic data on how stories perform with editorial judgement.

It isn’t new, but as newspapers chase dwindling revenues, cope with shrinking editorial teams, what users are reading online is having a creeping influence on news agendas. On what is featured, how it is featured and how long it gets a prime piece of online editorial real estate.

Alan Murray, executive editor for online at The Wall Street Journal puts it like this: how can you say you don’t care what your customers think?

He adds that the paper is balancing what its readers think with its own editorial judgment, but is clear from what he says that stories that are getting a lot of traffic they will get more attention and time on the home page.

Those that don’t perform so well disappear much faster – is this all pointing to the future?. The WSJ.com much more than its liberal rivals appears to be listening to the crowd and letting it (in part at least) drive its online editorial agenda.

Not on all stories and Murray cited to the New York Times an important, but dull story involving a Canadian fertilizer maker, the Potash Corporation, which editors displayed prominently despite “very” low traffic numbers.

“We didn’t put it there because it was going to be a big traffic getter. We put it there because it’s big important news in the business world,” Murray said.

At the New York Times itself Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor, is dismissive of the trend. He says it like this: the paper is not ‘American Idol’, there is no vote.

“We don’t let metrics dictate our assignments and play because we believe readers come to us for our judgement, not the judgement of the crowd,” Keller said.

At The Washington Post there is a big television screen that sits on display for the entire newsroom to see. It displays a range of traffic data and reporters can see just how well their stories are doing and how targets are being met. It shows red and green data for targets that have been met that month and those that have not.

It is quite a bold statement but it is one that could also be quite intimidating if no one is reading or sharing your story.

However, what’s clear a the Post is that it has not thrown out the idea of covering important stories that don’t always get the traffic it would like.

For instance its coverage of the UK elections did not score a lot of traffic online, but it is the kind of story that is important to the Post. More so than a story about the foam shoes called Crocs that as a result of search engine traffic became one of its top stories of the last year.

All sites get hit by that. Pulled by stories that ride a wave, but are not core or central to what a publication does.

Those readers of the Croc story are unlikely to be back to the Post where as the ones reading about the wheeling and dealing in Westminster will still be buying and reading the paper online.

What the crowd does is often provide a steer to do something different and that could be an online gallery, collating some blog posts or user generated content. It isn’t always about news, but the metrics provide a hint to what they are liking and not.

The Los Angeles Times is heading in the same direction as the WSJ.com. The paper has paired sports articles with food because (our survey says) there is a correlation.

As the technology advances and allows papers to look more deeply at performance metrics, newsrooms may find that there is just some data they would rather not know.

This could go further yet at the cash strapped The Los Angeles Times. It recently saw a software firm, Perfect Market, that said it could put a dollar price on how every story was performing and potentially reinvent the dying newspaper model – but just not for the better in everyone’s eyes.

This business model is akin to that being developed by the content farms, like Demand Media and Associated Content, and hyperlocal sites where assignments are driven by search engine metrics.

Those businesses are driven by cheap content for clicks that was according to one editor like a sweatshop.