Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle - NYTimes.com

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. Picturing the News Cycle 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.

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.
The study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories.

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."

MemeTracker builds maps of the daily news cycle by analyzing around 900,000 news stories and blog posts per day from 1 million online sources, ranging from mass media to personal blogs.

  View the electronic version of 'Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle'.