Data for: ‘Playing the Visibility Game’ Versus Practicing Journalism

While recent scholarship on human-algorithm interaction has shed light on how actors develop algorithmic knowledge and imaginaries to navigate visibility, it has largely focused on strategic actors driven by commercial incentives. Drawing on Weibo Trending Topics as a case study, this article addresses this gap through 15 semi-structured interviews with Chinese editors from legacy media, supplemented by document analysis. Our findings reveal that while editors enjoy (1) privileged access to traffic allocation, (2) amplified visibility for \"positive energy\" content, and (3) occasional insights into adjustments of trending rules, these \"algorithmic privileges\" coexist with structural constraints—namely, internal tensions between platform logic and journalistic norms, and external pressures to cautiously manage visibility amid risks of public backlash and regulatory penalties. We demonstrate how three conceptualizations of visibility—as reward, risk, and structural force—collectively shape editors' specific algorithmic practices on Weibo. By highlighting editors' agency to negotiate with, rather than merely cater to, Weibo's algorithms, we introduce the concept of \"steerable algorithms\" to emphasize their situatedness within China's socio-political context, where regulators play a key role in governing visibility dynamics.