Newspapers vs. Blogs: Who Gets the Scoop?

Abstract

Blogs and formal news sources both monitor the events of the day, but with substantially different frames of reference. In this paper, we report on experiments comparing over 500,000 blog postings with the contents of 66 daily newspapers over the same six week period. We compare the prevalence of popular topics in the blogspace and news, and in particular analyze lead/lag relationships in frequency time series of 197 entities in the two corpora. The correlation between news and blog references proved substantially higher when adjusting for lead/lag shifts, although the direction of these shifts varied for different entities.