But the Cornell research, experts say, goes further in trying to track the phenomenon of news ideas rising and falling.
“This is a landmark piece of work on the flow of news through the world,” said Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft and president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. “And the study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories.”
Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor specializing in new media at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, said the research was an ambitious effort to measure a social phenomenon that is not easily quantified.
“To the extent this kind of approach could open the door to a new understanding of the news cycle, that is very interesting,” he said.
A challenge in this kind of research, Sreenivasan said, will be to account for and model how quickly online news sources and distribution networks are changing. Sreenivasan pointed to social media, especially the rapidly rising Twitter, as an informal but highly influential news recommendation and distribution network.
“Even from last fall to today, the dynamics of the news cycle are very different because of Twitter,” he said.
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