Slashdot Mirror
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."
....because newspapers can't even ink their presses in 2.5 hours. Seriously. If the President was assassinated at 1PM today, the soonest any paper could publish anything about it would be maybe 5 hours later; assuming they put out a special edition. For all other severities of news, it's usually at least 24 hours old. I am guessing this study only included TV and web sites otherwise newspapers would drastically wonk the numbers.
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I hate the "main-stream media" as much as any one (watching CNN irritates the hell out of me - if I wanted to read Twitter, Rick Sanchez, I would get on the Internet!) and don't even get me started on Fox.
But this is obvious - there is very little original research going on the Web (the one counter example are the Abu Ghraib pictures as I remember those being posted to Live Journal long before they hit the rest of the media world). It's more of a sounding chamber for things already being reported - commentary more than original research.
My biggest fear is that the mainstream media is moving in the same direction - closing local branches, relying on Twitter and the Facebook, this competitive advantage that the media has is slowly being dissolved, by itself.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
What concerns me is that if citizens aren't active in the local government, it'll quickly fall apart and the national government won't even matter. It's important because citizens *can* have a profound impact on their local government, but fewer will do so if there isn't good information out there.
However, this means we're missing a huge chunk of actual world news. While we know of a few major items, we don't know about the aggregate of everything else. How many people died today? Glancing at Google News, you might note that maybe some people died from bombings, and a few others in battle, and maybe a few to flu. But that's a very tiny selection. High profile cases. How many people died in traffic accidents? Or from other disease or poor health? Old age? What regions? What were the numbers?
This is actual interesting information which would probably change our perspective drastically on a lot of issues. Unfortunately it takes a good bit of work to put it together, and it doesn't quite get you glamorous headlines. But it's world news, and the sort of thing that would be worth paying for.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Next time your local government does something that adversely affects you and you feel it totally sucks, think about how that lack of interest among you and the community contributes to that. I'm not saying its all your fault or anything like that. But people who don't take an interest in the goings-on in their community usually end up living in a horrid city with the kind of government they deserve.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
There is no way of monetising that will keep geeks happy. It's a myth peddled by people who want to justify the morality of blocking every ad, no matter how unintrusive.
The ways of making money:
Subscription - few people are willing to subscribe to a single site.
advertising - adblock. Only cast iron method of getting around it is by putting ads before videos and not displaying any videos until the ad has played through. But not every news site does videos.
Merchandise - CNN don't sell many DVDs and CNN branded T-shirts are hardly going to fly off the shelves.
Donations - People point to Wiki as an example of this being successful but it simply isn't viable for 99% of sites. If people donate at all they donate once and that's it. Wiki survives because of hard campaining for donations and because it looks good for companies to donate to.
Licencing content - when blogs can rip out all the juicy info from an article and just link to the source at the bottom, this simply isn't viable (that and you're moving the revenue problem downstream)
Only possible solution I could see is a subcription service that covers hundreds of sites. You pay $4.99 a month and the money gets divided up between sites based on page views. However this is a nightmare to set up and get people on board and you may find it's about as successful as regular subscriptions.
The point is that a lot of people are claiming the MSM is obsolete and blogs are the way of the future ... and this study pretty clearly shows that it isn't true.
I thought that would be the point of the story when I read it, but the story doesn't actually mention this issue at all. The researchers mostly seem to be interested in understanding how stories become popular, and the roles that blogs and traditional media play in that process.
In the original paper (e.g., Figure 8), they report that there is a 2.5 hour lag between the peak of reporting on a story in the media in general and the peak of discussion in the blogs in general.
They also report the typical time lag for individual news outlets or blogs (Table 1), and show that a few individual blogs (e.g., hotair.com and talkingpointsmemo.com) have tend to report stories before individual media outlets. However, even this doesn't show that news appears in blogs before it appears in the media -- some individual blogs tend to report big stories before individual news outlets, but that may be because (a) they pull stories from many news outlets, so they will inevitably have an earlier average reporting time than any individual news outlet, and (b) the early-mover blogs play a role in determining which stories become popular, even if they aren't the first to report them.
Unfortunately, I didn't see any graph that tracked the earliest appearance of a story in any media outlet, and the earliest appearance of the same story in any blog, and compared the times of those appearances. That would be the way to really answer the question of who is reporting first. And I bet it's the media, by many hours.