Abstract
Items featured in the news usually have a particular novelty or describe events which result in severe impact. Here, the length of time that a story remains in the media spotlight is investigated as well as the scaling with population size of the amount of attention that the media gives to stories from different cities. Based on Twitter feeds, the media coverage from the major online newspapers in Mexico is analysed over a period either side of a recent powerful earthquake. The amount of coverage given to earthquake-related stories had an initial peak and then exhibited an exponential decay, dropping by half every eight days. Furthermore, the coverage per person usually exhibits a superlinear scaling with population size, so that stories about larger cities are more likely to appear in the news. However, during the immediate post-earthquake weeks, the scaling was no longer superlinear. The observed trends can be interpreted as a fundamental switch in the emergent collective behaviour of media producers and consumers.
Highlights
From all the events which occur daily, only a few are deemed to be newsworthy enough to be reported as news in traditional print newspapers or online (Harcup & O'Neill, 2001)
Considering the scaling coefficient of the media coverage as a continuous function of time β(t), again with t measured in days, results show that by one week after the earthquake, β(7) ≈ 0.62 showing that coverage is given to smaller cities but this behaviour changes by the end of the third week when β(21) ≈ 1
It has been found that the producers of the most popular online newspapers with national coverage in Mexico and their consumers, follow an emergent collective behaviour by which the amount of coverage that they give to an event that affected a range of Mexican cities decays over time
Summary
From all the events which occur daily, only a few are deemed to be newsworthy enough to be reported as news in traditional print newspapers or online (Harcup & O'Neill, 2001). Editors of traditional media set a general agenda and coordinate with journalists to decide what is newsworthy, they consider feedback from their audience (predominantly feedback gleaned after publication, perhaps by years of their audiences' cumulative attention or indifference to certain types of news). This is an area of debate, it might be considered that the audience itself ‘manages the news’ by maintaining or losing interest in a given subject (Downs, 1972). Any significant discrepancies between reality and what is portrayed by the media reveal the interests of their audience
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