You Are So 36 Hours Ago
How long is a news cycle? 24 hours? 24 minutes? Do news cycles still matter?
According to a new research paper, “The Dynamics of Information Access on the Web,” reported in the New York Times this week, “36 hours is the amount of time it takes for half of the total readership of an [online] article to have read it.” In other words, stories have a 36 hour shelf life.
In the age of 24/7 cable and the Internet, I would have expected the news cycle to be a few hours at best.
As reported by Noam Cohen of the New York Times on July 17th, readers read in “bursts” and do not read articles evenly throughout the day. These bursts may explain why “readership rates don’t drop off precipitously for particular articles after a few hours.”
For news editors, viewing patterns are very relevant. They help determine how long a story should occupy prime online real estate and how to package news items for occasional readers who visit websites irregularly. One of the leaders of the study – Albert László Barabási -- suggested that editors may want to revisit how often they refresh content. Perhaps there are ways to package content to suit the viewing habits of individual readers to a site and therefore give PR folks a chance to extend the life of a story.
In the age of blogs, I am not sure if a news cycle is relevant or even measurable. Does it still exist or is its time frame still being determined as stories take on a life of their own in ways that reporters or editors never intended?
In the days before blogs, I gauged my success in managing press in 24 hour increments. If I were lucky, a bad story may appear on the evening news or in the morning paper for one, maybe two days. Today I don't have that luxury.
An article on an online news site can have multiple lives in the blogosphere. The blogosphere’s reaction to an article can make its way back to the original news site – the so called coverage of coverage phenomenon. Or the article can lie dormant on a server only to be summoned in subsequent searches by readers. In other words, a news story may never really die.
The actual article is only part of the dynamic. How bloggers digest and refashion it is the other -- especially if the blogger is the reporter who wrote the article in the first place.
All of this reminds me of the long tail theory put forth in Chris Anderson's book by the same title that is making the rounds in a flurry of recent book reviews. (As an aside -- according to the Economist Magazine [subscription required], for the past two years, technology “conference goers have entertained themselves playing a guessing game of how many times will a speaker mention the phrase long tail.”)
Well in this case, I cite the long tail, because it relates to news consumption. Just as the Internet can generate sizeable profits for the remaining 80 percent of all products, so can blogging and the Internet itself generate interest in an article long past its point of initial publication when presumably it had its highest news value.
For the record: that’s 3 long tails.
Let me get back to you.
