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 researcher's 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. 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. "This is a landmark piece of work on the flow of news through the world," said Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft. "The study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories."" Link to Original Source
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I found out about Michael Jackson's death within just a few minutes of it happening. I was reading a very small site(only about 80 members) having nothing to do with music, and my television and radio were off.
A half-hour or so later I read comment responses to the internet-posted stories that said that the television news media had just started reporting his death.
Michael Jackson's death (Score:2)
This study seems incorrect.
I found out about Michael Jackson's death within just a few minutes of it happening. I was reading a very small site(only about 80 members) having nothing to do with music, and my television and radio were off.
A half-hour or so later I read comment responses to the internet-posted stories that said that the television news media had just started reporting his death.