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."
/. puts the best bits all in one neat package regardless where its from.
did it appear on the NYT site 2.5 hours after the paper came out?
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?
I don't know what's the point of this finding. Do they think 2.5 hours is too fast or too slow?
This seems pretty fast for me. Most bloggers are not in 1st person contact of the event. It is understandable that they will not know the event before the media talks about that. They will also not immediate login their blog immediately to write their post. They can even write a post several days later!
It would be more interesting to study the fastest of the blog posts, say 5%, and see whether they beat the media.
The problem is also that they averaged in slashdot with the other blogs. Without Slashdot's "yesterday's news today" and week-old repeats I'm sure the blog average would be higher.
Help I'm a rock.
All they want is your respect! They want to stand out in a crowd! THEY HEARD IT FIRST! The proof is right there, in their wordpress history!
....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.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
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)
Traditional news sometime can even lead the reality. Bloggers simply cannot top them without psychic or divine intervention.
Oh, yeah...the New York Times, the poster child for Old Media, does a story and finds that they are better than the competition. Sorry, but I'd sooner believe an online pharmacy that did a survey and found that it was better than the competition. But, since it has the NYT name on it, the people in the know nod sagely and agree. Anyone shouting "the emperor has no clothes" is deemed as not part of the in-group and escorted to the door, never to be invited to the best parties again.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Many bloggers comment on the news, but not all bloggers are investigative reporters looking to be the first to break a story. They're just expressing their opinion on the events, when they happen to hear about them.
If you crawl 90 million articles on blogs and newspapers and average all the times, of course the blogs will be hours behind.
NY Times is intentionally missing the point, to make themselves feel more relevant.
blogs by and large are about ideas, not news, so it seems like this is an apples and oranges study, discovering (surprise, surprise) that apples are more like apples than oranges are. Now maybe if the study had compared editorials to blogs...
Hardly surprising.
The study measured the time that ideas/memes/stories took to come out. Given that nowadays a large number of "stories" are released by politicians/companies and most do so in a tightly controlled way, usually by means of "statements to the press" or "interviews".
Guess who gets the press passes or the interviews? The press, not the bloggers.
That said, blogs are almost entirely opinion pieces: they don't break the news, instead they give us the blogger's personal interpretations of the news (or opinion over the state of something or something-else in the world).
The best blogs are those which analyze multiple news and events and bring them together with other knowledge to show us the patterns and flows behind the public facade: in a sense, investigative journalism on the cheap (they don't usually validate the sources).
If you define "news" as stories like "lipstick on a pig," of course Old Media is going to lead. They invented those stories in the first place, pulling memes out of their collective asses and headlining them in explosions of inanity, while ignoring real issues. If the study focused on phrases like "obama secrecy," "12 trillion to banks," or "single-payer healthcare," I doubt Old Media would even register.
I'm sure all of us have looked at digg once or twice and there are blog posts that get made quite popular there, develop a following and then end up in the paper.
In fact anything that originates on the internet is likely to be reported about first in a blog than "traditional media".
Many local stories might end up getting reported about first on a blog before "traditional media" if they're not high profile. The news has to get a reporter there first. then film it or write it. A blogger can see it, and do it right away if they have a smartphone or as soon as they get home/to a pc.
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.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
99% of the content of blogs is personal blather or links to other stuff on the web. BFD. News organizations actually -- here's a shock -- gather the news, with people who are paid to do it.
I piss off bigots.
I wonder what percentage were later retracted as completely bogus. Jeff Goldblume might be able to point out one recent issue
After reading through the paper, I see it's clear the authors didn't test news content at all, just soundbites. So for example, they search for the Sarah Palin quote:
"Our opponent is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." ...and close derivatives of if on Google News, then on blogs to see where it appeared first. The problem with this methodology is that traditional media tended to report the quote uncritically, while the blogs took it and dissected it. In other words, corporate "news" media did fuck-all for reporting on the topic. The blogs did actual reporting work and found out that Palin was stretching the truth (surprise!), examined the facts behind her claim, and generally did the work mainstream media failed to do themselves.
So the bottom line is, if you want to know who can regurgitate phrases faster, the paper makes it clear that mainstream media is the obvious winner. If you want in-depth reporting, look to the web.
I use my family members to track public awareness -- my mom listens to safe, comfy nutritionless mainstream media products from NBC, my dad listens to right wing hate radio, and my sister tries to avoid hearing anything about anything but leans progressive.
My dad is marginally better informed than my sister if only because they can't lie about everything and some nuggets of truth slip through. If you assign a negative weight to all the stuff he knows that just isn't so, he's far less informed.
My mom only knows what the MSM wants to cover but has gradually come to distrust it. Over the eight years of Boosh, I would keep bringing up things she had not heard of only to hear then six to twelve months later on the news. It's not that this stuff wasn't out there to be discovered, it's just that nobody was talking about it. Say a bit of news gets flushed out on an Infodump Friday, the blogs would pick it up and talk about it even as the talking heads ignored it. Enough blog interest could eventually make the story big enough for the MSM to start covering it again. What finally convinced her that NBC is morally bankrupt was seeing that insidious little investment gnome Cramer go on Jon Stewart, get his ass handed to him, then show up on the Today show a few days later doing his same old schtick. This was a man revealed to the world as a fraud and yet there were no consequences. "Of course there aren't. Morning shows like this are one big commercial. There's the little 30 second ones and then there's the longer ones with the hosts. They put Cramer on to drum up interest for his CNBC show."
A really telling figure is that the ratings for the various professional news outlets are very, very minuscule compared to the size of the nation. A top-rated cable news show will have a million viewers and that's compared to a nation of 300 million?
I think a better study would be trying to figure out the permeation level of the news sources through the society at large. It seems like most people are completely disconnected like my sister and only find out things through hearsay. So if Rush Limbaugh puts out the idea that Obama has a fake birth certificate, if that little meme goes beyond his shows and people who never listen to him start believing it, that's an influence far beyond his nominal audience. Second-hand disinformation? Goebbels called this sort of thing the Big Lie but I call it the "big penis stunt." I start talking about having a 12-inch dick. At first, the response will be "no, you don't" and "perv!" But if I keep talking about it, eventually the comments will shift from challenging the existence of my 12-inch dick to my talking about it. This presupposes the existence of the prodigious prong and now the debate is over whether it's appropriate to discuss in public. Doesn't matter if I'm actually hung like a Ken doll, everyone else knows I'm not.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
News organizations lead blogs, it's true, but they suffer repeated embarrassment as respondants do actual fact checking.
I subscribe to FT, WSJ, NYT, The Economist, National Geographic, Smithsonian and Scientific American.
I would submit that the number of factual errors per million words in each of these is *vastly* lower than what you'd get by having your bullshit community moderated nonsense.
I mean, look at community websites for a minute, then realize that as much as you hate to admit it, traditional fact checkers are more reliable than asking a bunch of opinionated people to express their opinion about a fact, to determine it's truthiness.
Here's to hoping that your blazingly idiotic and idealistic notions never become the norm, because that would be the death of accurate information.
Ok, allow me to amend my previous claim.
Factual errors includes the omission of information or perspectives thus producing a one-sided or outright dogmatic tone in an article.
Heaviest example: music downloading.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
How 'bout this: We have "traditional" journalists produce stories, doing their in-depth investigatory thing, but then we deliver those stories on the web, cutting out the whole "paper, trucks, printing" thing that costs money.
Just because something is delivered on the internet doesn't mean it cannot contain a high degree of professional journalism.
What does have to change, though, is people's willingness to pony up a few cents to read this professional work. Either that, or a willingness to turn off AdBlock for those sites that provide a professional product.
I've got no problem paying for online subscriptions for a product that's worth something. And as a longtime subscriber to the NY Times and Chicago Tribune, I've already decided that their product is worth something. Shit, I pay a subscription for goddamn Slashdot because I value the product. It's such a tiny amount that I don't notice it, and I roll with the lowest level of AdBlocking.
What's NOT going to work is having newspapers owned by public corporations. Shareholders don't care about the importance of journalism or the institution of a Free Press (oh, I read that, too.) It takes a civic minded rich family to do that. However, one of the problems of our current "free market" system is that it seeks out and destroys civic-minded rich families for "not showing enough third-quarter growth".
You are welcome on my lawn.
I didn't miss the 3.5% comment. That doesn't change the fact news organizations are big and so bias perceptions of what is seen as big news events. Its a fact news organizations can spread the news wide as they have many readers so each bit of news they release gets to become high profile news far more often and so is seen as a "news event". When blogs release news, most of that they say is simply drowned out and ignored as its readership is so much smaller than global media organizations.
If you still don't believe this then try this simple experiment. Setup a blog and start selling a product. Add up the number of units you sell in 1 week. Now get a national news organization to show your exact same product on its front page news. From the moment its shown in the news, compare how many units you sell during your following week, after your so called 15 minutes of fame. Its a no brainier that the national news coverage would vastly have far greater impact than your blog, yet nothing other than the means of delivery of the news about the product has changed.
Due to the shear size and power of news organizations they cannot help biasing the perception of what is seen as important news, but more than even that, they bias what is seen as a news event. They make it important news by showing that news. So its no wonder they appear to feature prominently in what is perceived as news events.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
The lack of an obvious "Blame Bush" angle proved an impediment.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear