[Infowarrior] - Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle

[Richard Forno]

July 13, 2009
Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle
By STEVE LOHR
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/technology/internet/13influence.html?_r=1&hpw=&pagewanted=print
For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs  
follow, typically by 2.5 hours, according to a new computer analysis  
of news articles and commentary on the Web during the last three  
months of the 2008 presidential campaign.

The finding was one of several in a study that Internet experts say is  
the first time the Web has been used to track — and try to measure —  
the news cycle, the process by which information becomes news,  
competes for attention and fades.

Researchers at Cornell, using powerful computers and clever  
algorithms, studied the news cycle by looking for repeated phrases and  
tracking their appearances on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and  
blogs. Some 90 million articles and blog posts, which appeared from  
August through October, were scrutinized with their phrase-finding  
software.

Frequently repeated short phrases, according to the researchers, are  
the equivalent of “genetic signatures” for ideas, or memes, and story  
lines. The biggest text-snippet surge in the study was generated by  
“lipstick on a pig.” That 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. Associates of  
Mr. McCain suggested that the remark was meant as an insult to Ms.  
Palin.

The researchers’ data points to an evolving model of news media. While  
most news flowed from the traditional media to the blogs, the study  
found that 3.5 percent of story lines originated in the blogs and  
later made their way to traditional media. For example, when Mr. Obama  
said that the question of when life begins after conception was “above  
my pay grade,” the remark was first reported extensively in blogs.

And though the blogosphere as a whole lags behind, a relative handful  
of blog sites are the quickest to pick up on things that later gain  
wide attention on the Web, led by Hot Air and Talking Points Memo.

The Cornell research, like so much of the data mining on the Web, does  
raise the issue of whether something is necessarily significant just  
because it can be measured by a computer — especially when mouse  
clicks are assumed to represent broad patterns of human behavior.

“You can see this kind of research as further elevating the role of  
sound bites,” said Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at  
Cornell and a co-author of a paper on the research that was presented  
two weeks ago at a conference in Paris. “But what we’re doing is more  
using them as the approximation for ideas and story lines.”

“We don’t view quotes as the most important object, but algorithms can  
capture quotes,” Mr. Kleinberg said. “And we see this research as  
using a rich data set as a step toward understanding why certain  
points of view and story lines win out, and others don’t.”

The paper, “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle,” was  
also written by Jure Leskovec, a postgraduate researcher at Cornell,  
who this summer will become an assistant professor at Stanford, and  
Lars Backstrom, a Ph.D. student at Cornell, who is going to work for  
Facebook. The team has set up interactive displays of their findings  
at memetracker.org.

Social scientists and media analysts have long examined news cycles,  
though focusing mainly on case studies instead of working with large  
Web data sets. And computer scientists have developed tools for  
clustering and tracking articles and blog posts, typically by subject  
or political leaning.

But the Cornell research, experts say, goes further in trying to track  
the phenomenon of news ideas rising and falling. “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.”

Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor specializing in new media at the  
Columbia Journalism School, said the research was an ambitious effort  
to measure a social phenomenon that is not easily quantified. “To the  
extent this kind of approach could open the door to a new  
understanding of the news cycle, that is very interesting,” he said.

A challenge in this kind of research, Mr. Sreenivasan said, will be to  
account for and model how quickly online news sources and distribution  
networks are changing. Mr. Sreenivasan pointed to social media,  
especially the rapidly rising Twitter, as an informal but highly  
influential news recommendation and distribution network.

“Even from last fall to today, the dynamics of the news cycle are very  
different, because of Twitter,” he said.