Meta memes, breaking news, and categorizing the media

I heard about this meme-tracking study (Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle by Leskovec Backstrom & Kleinberg) a few days ago, probably via a Twitter link to this NYT article. I’m pretty familiar with this area of research so I just thought of it as something I would look up to check out their methods and see what kind of software and archives they used.

Today, however, I followed a link from Jay Rosen’s Twitter that said “Blogs vs. big media in news diffusion, huh? Submit to frame check http://tr.im/sFL9 by @sjcobrien. Its one system, baby.” This took me to Chris O’Brian’s post where he argues against distinguishing between blogs and mainstream news. “I see blogs not as competition, but vital parts that help expand the conversation around news and information. I worry less about who is winning the battle of breaking news first, whether it’s mainstream sources, blogs, or Twitter.” It’s a valid point, but that is not a criticism of the research that was actually carried out. There are lots of other things one could or should focus on when researching the news media ecosystem but a study is just that. One article might add one piece of the puzzle and there is always more to do. It seems perfectly reasonable to explore where news memes originate particularly as we have lost several mainstream news organizations recently and the two major newspapers in Chicago are currently in bankruptcy. I could think of more useful “memes” to track, but it seems like an interesting piece.

It is necessary to develop some form of categorization of news sources (which need not be binary) to research this question. This is always imperfect but it can be done in better or worse ways. That’s where Scott Rosenberg adds to the conversation. Rather than criticizing the idea of doing the study at all, he digs into the methods and finds that “the study relies on Google News to draw a boundary between the news media and blogs. A site that appears in Google News is considered media; everything else is a blog. While this approach is convenient, it ends up slicing off some of the top layer of the blogosphere in arbitrary ways.” Good point. It’s really key to know that, by this definition, if a phrase shows up on the Daily Kos, which is a Google News source, it would count as mainstream news in this study. It’s important to develop better ways of categorizing news, which may (gasp) involve human decision makers as well as computers. Developing categories of news sources is not the same as labeling journalists who, like Chris O’Brian, may write for many different types of outlets.

Let’s discuss what kind of meaningful distinctions remain among news organizations so we can do better research rather than waving our hands and saying it’s impossible.