For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours, according to a new computer analysis of news articles and commentary on the Web during the last three months of the 2008 presidential campaign.
The finding was one of several in a study that Internet experts say is the first time the Web has been used to track — and try to measure — the news cycle, the process by which information becomes news, competes for attention and fades.
I’m not particularly surprised by the results of this study, but am very surprised that someone as credible as Cornell did it.
I’m also fascinated with the simple but readily functional definition of a news cycle – “the process by which information becomes news, competes for attention and fades.” I have not run into that before but it pretty much says it all.
