By IANS,
Washington : As more and more news appears on the internet as well as in print, it becomes possible to map the global flow of news by observing it online. Using this strategy, computer scientists have managed to track and analyze the “news cycle” — the way stories rise and fall in popularity.
Jon Kleinberg, professor of computer science at Cornell University, Jure Leskovec and Lars Backstrom tracked 1.6 million online news sites, including 20,000 mainstream media sites and a vast array of blogs.
They worked over a three-month period leading up to the 2008 presidential election – representing a total of 90 million articles, one of the largest
analyses anywhere of online news.
They found a consistent rhythm as stories rose into prominence and then fell off over just a few days, with a “heartbeat” pattern of hand offs between
blogs and mainstream media.
In mainstream media, they found, a story rises to prominence slowly then dies quickly; in the blogosphere, stories rise in popularity very quickly but then stay around longer, as discussion goes back and forth. Eventually though, almost every story is pushed aside by something newer.
“The movement of news to the internet makes it possible to quantify something that was otherwise very hard to measure — the temporal dynamics of the news,” said Kleinberg.
“We want to understand the full news ecosystem, and online news is now an accurate enough reflection of the full ecosystem to make this possible. This is one [very early] step toward creating tools that would help people understand the news, where it’s coming from and how it’s arising from the confluence of many sources.”
The researchers also say their work suggests an answer to a longstanding question: Is the “news cycle” just a way to describe our perception of what’s going on in the media, or is it a real phenomenon that can be measured? They opt for the latter, and offer a mathematical explanation of how it works, said a Cornell release.
The research was presented at the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference June 28-July 1 in Paris.