The Life and Death of a News Article
The heartbeat of the news.
Ever since June 25, 2009, Michael Jackson’s death has been the talk of the nation, his face plastered over web articles, newspapers, and television stations. His death broke the record for the number of users on Yahoo news at any one point in time, topping even President Barack Obama’s inauguration, and even Google believed its servers were under attack due to the sudden spike in web searches for the moon-walking legend. However, have you ever wondered why the news of the King of Pop’s untimely death has stayed in the media for so long, while other news topics, such as the death of another cultural icon, Farrah Fawcett, quickly died out?
Jon Kleinberg, Jure Leskovec, and Lars Backstroma, from the computer science department at Cornell, sought to answer these types of questions by tracking the life-cycle of news articles for a three month period during 2008. Their research included 20,000 mainstream media sites and over 90 million articles. Using a complex algorithm which could identify certain phrases in different news articles such that the computer could mark them as being of the same subject (a task that has proven to be very difficult time and time again), the team tracked the movement of news using across blogs and news sites across the Internet. Armed with an extensive pool of data to sift through and analyze, the three researchers discovered an astounding pattern that was shared throughout most news topics.
They found a consistent rhythm as stories rose into prominence and then fell off over just a few days, with a “heartbeat” pattern of handoffs between blogs and mainstream media. In mainstream media, they found, a story rises to prominence slowly then dies quickly; in the blogosphere, stories rise in popularity very quickly but then stay around longer, as discussion goes back and forth. Eventually though, almost every story is pushed aside by something newer.
Before research like this was done, many editors and journalists perceived something they described to be a “news cycle.” However, with no quantifiable data, there was no way to be confident whether this was just their perceptions or an actual phenomenon. With the information collected by these Cornell researchers, they believe the latter to be the case and have started to create mathematical models which would accurately describe the life-cycle of news.
The slow rise of a new story in the mainstream, the researchers suggest, results from imitation – as more sites carried a story, other sites were more likely to pick it up. But the life of a story is limited, as new stories quickly push out the old. A mathematical model based on the interaction of imitation and recency predicted the pattern fairly well, the researchers said, while predictions based on either imitation or recency alone couldn’t come close.
This type of news excites me because it shows how technology and the Internet have produced a tangible result (in this case, a physical model to the life cycle of a news article) to a question that would have been unsolvable 20 years ago. Truly the capabilities of technology to solve even the most abstract problems are limitless.
