Cornell study measures news cycle, examines influence of blogs

I found an article from the New York Times about a recent study conducted by Cornell University. The study browsed through over 1.6 million news sites and blogs looking for common phrases; these phrases, named in the article as “genetic signatures”, researchers said were the basis for story ideas and story lines. In fact, the study found that 3.5 percent of all headlines originate from blogs. The change in the data obtained during the study is partially attributed to the emergence of blogs and popular social networking sites, such as Facebook. But perhaps the news cycle has been more directly affected by what the article phrases as the “informal but highly influential news recommendation and distribution network”: Twitter. This data, in turn, depicted which ideas and headlines were popular among readers and which weren’t.
(from article)
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.”
I thought this idea was a very interesting connection between the different social aspects of our culture today (the increase in communication among people, for example) and the increase in news flow. People no longer have to rely on one news source; the have many difference places to go to hear and see what’s going on. Additionally, this enormously evolved web of news-gathering has grown so advanced that sources grab ideas from each other (such as media outlets gaining headlines from blogs). The phenomenon that this process has grown into is quite amazing, in my opinion. Yes, this availability of free news puts quite a burden on companies who made most of their money through print journalism, or even subscriptions through their Web site. Readers have begun to question, “Why should I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal when I can read the same story on Huffington Post for free?” Times are changing. But perhaps the change is not all bad, it’s just a change. Studies like this point us in the right direction of what’s working and what’s not. The industry is moving in a different direction, and it’s time to get ready for it.