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

So what's next?

[PhantomHarlock]

Which brings up the point again...traditional media outlets will need to figure out how to monetize and stay in business, or all those blogs will no longer have a source for their stories. Then we'll have nothing left but crowdsourced news. Which is OK in a riot or a protest, but otherwise does not come with the depth of research from a good, non-lazy journalist that does his or her homework, uses multiple sources to back up facts, etc. etc.

So what's the future look like? A merging of the blogosphere and traditional media to something new?

Re:So what's next?

[davmoo]

The problem is most traditional media outlets aren't doing that style of journalism any more. They fire as many of their local people as they can, and rely even more on AP and the intarwebs. Instead of bringing me in-depth local news that I can't get anywhere else and would be willing to pay for, they bring me news that I can find in 470 other locations for free.

Re:So what's next?

[DavidD_CA]

And then they wonder why no one wants to pay them $20/mo for a subscription.

You've hit the nail on the head. And this is why I think there will always be a place, albiet much smaller, for traditional reporters.

And that place won't be on dead trees. After all, reporting has nothing to do with the medium it's presented in.

Re:So what's next?

[superwiz]

You forgot to mention going out of business of most main-stream media (aka consolidation). So that only the intelligent news reporters and news sources would stay in business. The proliferation of MSM has reduced competitiveness of news reporting. Which has reduced quality. This is purely symbolic, but I spotted 2 typos on NYTimes front page (front page!!!) within the last year. If they are this careful with their front page, you can imagine how careful they are with they fact checking and analysis. There is simply too much job security in that business. When we moved from having 80% of people working on farms to 5% of people working on farms, which farmers do you think stayed employed? The least competent ones?

Re:Nobody Cares

[Hope Thelps]

/. puts the best bits all in one neat package regardless where its from.

Plus, I'd just feel stupid buying a newspaper in order to NOT read any of the articles and just get on with discussing them anyway - what a waste of money. Slashdot makes it feel natural.

Re:Nobody Cares

[fractoid]

Contrariwise, traditional 'read-only' media is increasingly annoying to me. I'll hear some news snippet on the radio and want to post a comment.

CIA would pay $$$ for this kind of study

[AHuxley]

How to shape with twitter in near real time. Iran was a good test run for that. 1000's of fake pro 'green' Iran bursts all at the same time, to get the topic as number one.
All pre package and ready to look 'organic'.
Then track and promote the end losers who fall for it and become the real grass roots.
US Ethno-Political Conflict Simulator: Influencing Leaders and Followers, 3 Oct 2006 should give slashdot readers a taste of the fun the US gov has in the 3rd world.
The only question is what is been done in the USA via data like this?
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/US_Ethno-Political_Conflict_Simulator:_Influencing_Leaders_and_Followers%2C_3_Oct_2006

Re:Nobody Cares

[operator_error]

But who on /. bothers to RTFA anyway?

And is this a higher percentage than Digg's article/quality-comment ratio? Mind you, the comments on digg are often so inane, if it wasn't for the articles, what's the point? In fact let me continue. It seems the comments by John & Jane Q. Public left on various 'news' articles are often rather mindless, semi-anonymous comments mostly of shock value. Who bothers reading those? What does one hope to gain.

At least on /. I can learn to hack cheap routers from the comments left by readers.

It says something that blogs are more reliable..

[plasmacutter]

News organizations lead blogs, it's true, but they suffer repeated embarrassment as respondants do actual fact checking.

Maybe the lesson here is they should hold their tongues and do real investigations into the issues they cover and offer balanced analysis rather than regurgitate press releases or empty ideological sound bytes.

Blogs would lose relevance quickly if the news sources themselves provided this analysis along with truly open, community moderated, meta-moderated, and meta-meta-moderated response columns to help add any unmentioned perspectives, updates, or corrections.

If traditional outlets don't take the time to properly research and compose their stories and don't offer true opportunities for community feedback they will always run second string to the likes of slashdot, reddit, and the daily show.