Traditional News Media Lead Blogs By 2.5 Hours

Peace Corps Online writes "The NY Times reports that researchers at Cornell studying the news cycle by looking for repeated phrases and tracking some 90 million articles and blog posts which appeared from August through October 2008 on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs, have discovered that for the most part, traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours. The researchers studied frequently repeated short phrases, the equivalent of 'genetic signatures' for ideas. The biggest text-snippet surge found in the study — 'lipstick on a pig' originated in Barack Obama's colorful put-down of the claim by Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin that they were the genuine voices for change in the campaign. The researchers' paper, 'Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle,' (PDF) shows that although most news flowed from the traditional media to the blogs, 3.5 percent of story lines originated in the blogs and later made their way to traditional media."

Comments

Re:Not surprising

[Asdanf]

It would be more interesting to study the fastest of the blog posts, say 5%, and see whether they beat the media.

Fortunately, the researchers agree with you and did just that. And it turns out that some blogs do usually break stories before the MSM. I wonder why the NYTimes didn't lead with that finding...

Re:"Traditional" must not mean 'the paper'

[Norsefire]

For the newspaper, it would be the time it took for the journalists to write/gather the stories, the sub-editors to layout the page in InDesign, and most importantly for the advertising department to sell some very expensive ad space.

On the printing side, every 2 colour pages in a Broadsheet newspaper takes 4 printing plates (Black, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow), 4 plates take around 5-7 minutes to produce.

It doesn't take anywhere near 2.5 hours to ink the press, more like 10 minutes.

You're correct that it won't be anywhere near as fast as the Internet, but for a very big event they could have a special edition out in an hour or two (depending on pages, number of copies etc.)

Re:So what's next?

[Red Flayer]

You're saying you'd pay for in-depth local news where you currently have none, and I'm calling you a liar.

Before you call him a liar... you might want to check out the facts.

Local papers are closing their doors all the time. Local reporters are being laid off constantly. Circulation of local papers is in freefall.

Larger, regional papers are cutting their local reporting staff.

Just because you don't want it to be true doesn't mean that it isn't true.

Go ahead, look at your regional paper. How many stories are credited to the AP? How does this compare to three years ago?

Go ahead, call you local paper. Ask how many reporters they have on staff. Ask how many stringers they use. Compare this to three years ago.

The FACT is that local reporting is disappearing. Hell, even major state papers are reducing local coverage. The Star-Ledger in NJ used to have three full-time reporters in Trenton, which meant we'd get a decent amount of in-depth, researched, coverage into state politics. Now, they have one part-time reporter... the rest of the Trenton stories come through the AP. The quality is a tenth what it used to be. And that's for the state capital! Local news is even worse.

My local paper used to employ 11 people at the local office, and retain the services of about 10 or 15 stringers. Now they have 4 employees at the local office, and 8 stringers (plus a couple more during HS football season). Both the quantity and quality of local news has dropped enormously.

This is not a local trend. This is a national trend. The ASNE (American Society of Newspaper Editors) can barely talk about anything else -- they are fighting for survival. The ASME (Amer. Soc. of Magazine Editors) recognizes the problem for regional and local magazines as well.

But go ahead, lambast someone for lying when you yourself don't know the state of affairs. I suggest you read up on it a bit, you might be surprised how quickly local news is dying. Do you even read your local paper? Have you noticed how it has changed over the past few years? You might be lucky to have a local paper that bucks the trend... but it's only a matter of time before your paper suffers the same fate.

Personally, I think we need to figure out a way local news can be monetized on the web, because I see a value in professional local news -- and print media is going buh-bye in the long run. But I'm not sure it can be done without a huge (and largely unwelcome) change in how we feel about web content. Most people feel it should be free, and they are used to it being free. But that doesn't jibe with the fact that it costs money to produce quality reporting... so we have some painful adjustments (either no good local reporting, or having to pay for online content).