Traditional News Media Lead Blogs By 2.5 Hours 186
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."
Re:So what's next? (Score:1, Insightful)
Shhhh, quiet. Nobody is supposed to say that the emperor has no clothes...
Not surprising (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
The point is that a lot of people are claiming the MSM is obsolete and blogs are the way of the future -- I think I've seen a good thirty /. posts to that effect in just the last month -- and this study pretty clearly shows that it isn't true.
Re:Not surprising (Score:1, Insightful)
I suspect it is too fast.
Print media should vet and organise news articles. The internet is a disorganised mess of unverified stuff.
"Traditional" must not mean 'the paper' (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, duh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
How is this news? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:So what's next? (Score:4, Insightful)
What concerns me is that if citizens aren't active in the local government, it'll quickly fall apart and the national government won't even matter. It's important because citizens *can* have a profound impact on their local government, but fewer will do so if there isn't good information out there.
Re:So what's next? (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is most traditional media outlets aren't doing that style of journalism any more. They fire as many of their local people as they can, and rely even more on AP and the intarwebs. Instead of bringing me in-depth local news that I can't get anywhere else and would be willing to pay for, they bring me news that I can find in 470 other locations for free.
For those of you lucky enough to have both the Internet AND a TV, in the US, over the air stations are required to air so many hours of local news each day.
What backwoods little town do you come from where you think you're being shorted in-depth local news? You want to find your local news, go kick a state trooper in the nuts. I'd feel bad for him, but you'd find your local media. How in depth do you want it anyway? Maybe nobody gives a damn about some old house that burned down, or the availability of kerosene at the local mom & pop. Are you SURE you don't have a Foo Chronicle, Bar Tribune, Qux Times, or Gonad Weekly where you're from? Not even a monthly newsletter? Do you have any news to report?
You're saying you'd pay for in-depth local news where you currently have none, and I'm calling you a liar. Pick up a local newspaper (it's even cheaper than big media) and stop bullshitting. I'm guessing you don't actually WANT news, but entertainment, AKA /., AKA blogs. You probably feel entitled to that too, since you can get it 27452 other places free.
Re:So what's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, this means we're missing a huge chunk of actual world news. While we know of a few major items, we don't know about the aggregate of everything else. How many people died today? Glancing at Google News, you might note that maybe some people died from bombings, and a few others in battle, and maybe a few to flu. But that's a very tiny selection. High profile cases. How many people died in traffic accidents? Or from other disease or poor health? Old age? What regions? What were the numbers?
This is actual interesting information which would probably change our perspective drastically on a lot of issues. Unfortunately it takes a good bit of work to put it together, and it doesn't quite get you glamorous headlines. But it's world news, and the sort of thing that would be worth paying for.
Re:So what's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Next time your local government does something that adversely affects you and you feel it totally sucks, think about how that lack of interest among you and the community contributes to that. I'm not saying its all your fault or anything like that. But people who don't take an interest in the goings-on in their community usually end up living in a horrid city with the kind of government they deserve.
Re:So what's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
The ways of making money:
Subscription - few people are willing to subscribe to a single site.
advertising - adblock. Only cast iron method of getting around it is by putting ads before videos and not displaying any videos until the ad has played through. But not every news site does videos.
Merchandise - CNN don't sell many DVDs and CNN branded T-shirts are hardly going to fly off the shelves.
Donations - People point to Wiki as an example of this being successful but it simply isn't viable for 99% of sites. If people donate at all they donate once and that's it. Wiki survives because of hard campaining for donations and because it looks good for companies to donate to.
Licencing content - when blogs can rip out all the juicy info from an article and just link to the source at the bottom, this simply isn't viable (that and you're moving the revenue problem downstream)
Only possible solution I could see is a subcription service that covers hundreds of sites. You pay $4.99 a month and the money gets divided up between sites based on page views. However this is a nightmare to set up and get people on board and you may find it's about as successful as regular subscriptions.
Um, huh, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
The study is misleading (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:So what's next? (Score:3, Insightful)
Forgive me, but that sounds like you *may* be saying that adblocking is immoral? You aren't saying that are you?
I sure hope not, because implied social contracts in which I am obligated to view advertisements are also a myth.
Re:So what's next? (Score:4, Insightful)
It may not be illegal but that doesn't mean it's moral. You know it's cost them to write and host the material, you know they need advertising revenue to pay for this. Talking about "implied social contracts" doesn't change the fact you are making a moral choice to get the sweat off of someone else's brow without giving them anything in return.
Re:So what's next? (Score:2, Insightful)
Next time your local government does something that adversely affects you and you feel it totally sucks, think about how that lack of interest among you and the community contributes to that. I'm not saying its all your fault or anything like that. But people who don't take an interest in the goings-on in their community usually end up living in a horrid city with the kind of government they deserve.
That scales for any size of community. From local city level to international level it is what you do with it.
Re:So what's next? (Score:3, Insightful)
It is not a damn myth, it is a moral position. Some people may think it is an obligation, others think it is not.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that a lot of people are claiming the MSM is obsolete and blogs are the way of the future ... and this study pretty clearly shows that it isn't true.
I thought that would be the point of the story when I read it, but the story doesn't actually mention this issue at all. The researchers mostly seem to be interested in understanding how stories become popular, and the roles that blogs and traditional media play in that process.
In the original paper [memetracker.org] (e.g., Figure 8), they report that there is a 2.5 hour lag between the peak of reporting on a story in the media in general and the peak of discussion in the blogs in general.
They also report the typical time lag for individual news outlets or blogs (Table 1), and show that a few individual blogs (e.g., hotair.com and talkingpointsmemo.com) have tend to report stories before individual media outlets. However, even this doesn't show that news appears in blogs before it appears in the media -- some individual blogs tend to report big stories before individual news outlets, but that may be because (a) they pull stories from many news outlets, so they will inevitably have an earlier average reporting time than any individual news outlet, and (b) the early-mover blogs play a role in determining which stories become popular, even if they aren't the first to report them.
Unfortunately, I didn't see any graph that tracked the earliest appearance of a story in any media outlet, and the earliest appearance of the same story in any blog, and compared the times of those appearances. That would be the way to really answer the question of who is reporting first. And I bet it's the media, by many hours.
Maybe that's because they have reporters. (Score:3, Insightful)
retractions (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder what percentage were later retracted as completely bogus. Jeff Goldblume might be able to point out one recent issue
Re:Nobody Cares (Score:2, Insightful)
For the ultimate online discussion experience you can then ring up your wife and tell her that she's fat.
Re:So what's next? (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought that was kind of inferred by the way I then proceeded to explain why pretty much every other way of generating revenue isn't viable for most sites.
Re:So what's next? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is always going to be a hotly-debated topic.
Newspapers generate revenue to help fund their business by having ads on their page, yet if I flip past the full-page, right-facing ad for 'Product X', no one's going to cry 'foul' and insist I turn back and read the ad in full.
I have freedom of choice to read, or not read, ads in print - and I take steps to exercise that freedom online too.
Re:Nobody Cares (Score:1, Insightful)
/. puts the best bits all in one neat package regardless where its from.
This basically makes it a news aggregation blog. It's not an original news source because it does not (normally) have original articles.
It's not really a news blog because most news blog postings normally take the form of "this is my considered opinion on the news reported by original news source", whereas Slashdot summaries are generally pretty short.
What sets Slashdot appart from a lesser news aggregation blogs is emphasis on the discussion forum.
That's only with stories they want to cover (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Nobody Cares (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe you missed the part in the summary where they indicate that 3.5% of news stories originated at blogs, and then were picked up by the traditional media. Apparently their testing methodology can indeed detect stories that originate on blogs.
Re:So what's next? (Score:3, Insightful)
Semantics can be fun for a strawman, but you know what you are telling your web browser to "ask" for. It is your decision to say that you want to take without giving.
Since I failed at analogy before, let me try again. What you are suggesting is the same as not tipping a waiter, or the same as letting some high-school wash your car for free because the sign said "Free-will donations accepted".
Again, those things are not illegal. I'm sure some people could try to argue why that isn't even immoral. It is being an ass, though.
Re:So what's next? This. (Score:3, Insightful)
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".
Re:So what's next? (Score:3, Insightful)
You sir, are a professional ass.
Does your browser inform the server it will be blocking all the ads? If your browser did inform the server and more websites refused to display their content to you... would you continue or lie and say "yes, i'll be viewing ads" and block them anyways? I think your position will fail when skipping the ads becomes impossible and you'll have to choose between "no content" and "content + ads".
Global Media Organization vs Joe Blog (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:So what's next? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd agree that is a large portion of the decline in traditional news outlets/papers. Too many shallow stories without deep investigative work. Take political stories for example, you almost always see the news outlets repeat the "company" lines without any analysis as to whether they're right or not. On some things, there is no "right" answer, but for many things there is a position that is much more tenable, is not framed to be misleading, etc. News outlets need to hit on these things.
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Their other issue is they've been giving it away for years now. People are used to getting it for free, why pay now?