New Study Measures How News Spreads on the Net

Posted 07/13/2009 at 6:29am | by Paul Lilly

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Back when our great-grandparents used to walk barefoot to school in scorching hot snow uphill both ways, folks stay connected to world events through newspapers, word of mouth, or via the Pony Express. A lot has changed since then, and in between taking online correspondence courses and sipping on lattes while wearing a robe and slippers to avoid being chilled from the central air conditioning, today's generation consumes the news online.

So it was only a matter of time before someone studied the modern news cycle, and that's exactly what researchers at Cornell have done. Using what The New York Times describes as "powerful computers and clever algorithms," the research team scoured 90 million articles and blog posts on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs looking for repeated phrases.

The end result? In most cases, traditional news outlets led the way with blogs following behind, usually by 2.5 hours. However, that wasn't always the case; 3.5 percent of story lines originated from blogs and then made their way to traditional media.

"This is a landmark piece of work on the flow of news through the world," said Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft and president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. "And the study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories."

Image Credit: jedsundwall.com