Cutline Speaks

Quantifying the news cycle

posted by Michael on July 13, 2009

Interesting piece in the New York Times yesterday, reporting on the results of a recent Cornell study on how news cycles evolve and how long that evolution takes. Here's how the Times described the study:

Researchers at Cornell, using powerful computers and clever algorithms, studied the news cycle by looking for repeated phrases and tracking their appearances on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs. Some 90 million articles and blog posts, which appeared from August through October, were scrutinized with their phrase-finding software.

­The phrases the sof­tware tracked included "lipstick on a pig" and "above my paygrade," as they appeared in the coverage of the last three months of the 2008 presidential campaign. The study found that coverage of these quotes generally popped up first in the traditional media, and then worked their way into the blogosphere an average of 2.5 hours later. The study also found that, in 3.5 percent of the cases it examined, coverage began in the blogosphere and then seeped into the mainstream media.

Source: Nieman Journalism Lab

These findings raise some interesting questions, both about the value of this kind of data mining and about whether the trends they seem to reflect are actually quantifiable in any meaningful kind of way. Columbia professor of journalism Sree Sreenivasan addresses the latter point in the Times piece:

A challenge in this kind of research, Mr. Sreenivasan said, will be to account for and model how quickly online news sources and distribution networks are changing. Mr. Sreenivasan pointed to social media, especially the rapidly rising Twitter, as an informal but highly influential news recommendation and distribution network. "Even from last fall to today, the dynamics of the news cycle are very different, because of Twitter," he said.

I'd also add that the results here may have been impacted by the news topic -- politics and campaigning -- that the researchers chose for their study. Maybe it is true, as the study suggests, that the mainstream media tends to lead and the blogosphere tends to follow on this particular topic. But would that also be true when it comes to, say, technology news? And couldn't the fact that the mainstream media seemed to get a jump on these campaign-trail quotes be explained by the presence of the embedded journalists that traditionally tag along with presidential campaigns?

Perhaps the most interesting critique of the study, however, can be found on the Niemen Journalism Lab blog. The NJL guys point out some potentially serious flaws in the methodology of the study (which made use of Google News), and ultimately leans on one of the study's authors to draw the following conclusion:

What [the study] finds is a surprisingly narrow gap between 20,000 prominent news sources, of all stripes, that are indexed in Google News and 1.6 million websites that don’t make the cut. Or, as Jon Kleinberg, an author of the study, told me: "This shows how important it is to look at blogs and news media as one single organism."

What do you think? Do the study's findings jibe with your experience? Weigh in below in the comments section.

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