News Still Originates With Established Media Outlets

by lisa ~ July 13, 2009

Blogs broke only 3.5% of news stories during the U.S. presidential election during the period of August-October 2008, according to a new study by Cornell University researchers. Most news flowed in the other direction - from mainstream media to blogs - within about 2.5 hours.

According to Steve Lohr, writing in place of David Carr’s column in The New York Times, it’s the first study that has used the Web to analyze the news cycle. The researchers did this “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.”

The political blogs that were the quickest to pick up ideas that later migrated to the mainstream media were Hot Air and Talking Points Memo. The researchers’ other blog sources were as follows:

• politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com
• huffingtonpost.com
• digg.com
• breitbart.com
• thepoliticalcarnival.blogspot.com
• talkleft.com
• dailykos.com

The established media were as follows:

• blogs.abcnews.com
• uk.reuters.com
• cnn.com
• washingtonpost.com
• online.wsj.com
• ap.org

While these results are, frankly, no surprise, the scope of U.S. politics is rather limited. It would be curious to see a similar study track a more global issue - say, the Iranian elections. Would the results be the same or would underground and/or online news outlets be more influential due to the crackdown on traditional media? I suspect that Twitter would become a significant factor in the flow of information.

And what about completely frivolous celebrity gossip? The power of Perez Hilton and TMZ would certainly skew the results!

To read the full study, titled “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle,” click here.

The researchers’ Web site can be found here.

To read The New York Times article “Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle,” click here.

Lisa Tibbitts  is a corporate communications professional with an MBA in marketing. Follow her on Twitter: http://twitter.com/FinancialPR.

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