Study Gives New Meaning to "Word Travels Fast"

There are many ways one can describe online news and social media these days, some laudatory and some unprintable. But don't think for a minute that Web communication and information sharing doesn't have a heart.

A new Cornell study proves it does. Researchers Jure Leskovec, Lars Backstrom and Jon Kleinberg set out to develop a framework for studying how short phrases traveled in online news environments, tracking 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs over a three-month period, taking into account 90 million articles during the period leading up to last year's historic Presidential election.

"In particular, we observe a typical lag of 2.5 hours between the peaks of attention to a phrase in the news media and in blogs respectively, with divergent behavior around the overall peak and a “heartbeat”-like pattern in the hand off between news and blogs," the researchers stated. "We also develop and analyze a mathematical model for the kinds of temporal variation that the system exhibits."

Some of us in the online media knew this existed already as we're often treading water furiously to stay on top of the news given the rush to 'print,' and now the need to separate the chaff from the wheat, or in laymen's media terms, the bulldinkie from the facts.

The study also provides a chart on phrases that pushed news cycles forward into mini tsunamis of media alert overload and what's sad is that it's the tabloid stuff that seems to grab readers most:

Remember the renowned "lipstick on a pig" comment? That actually beat out this one: "Our entire economy is in danger," and even more frightening, this public statement: "Russian aggression must not go unanswered."

The study isn't light beach reading, and it's just a tiny step toward understanding how Web "journalism" is playing a role in mainstream media. But it's definitely an interesting take on the "news" being covered, why it's being covered, and how its importance is influenced by online media which is sometimes more focused on gaining traffic than reporting what's new.