Finding Potential News from Trends Originating in the Blogosphere

Nigel Dewdney
2015 Research in Computing Science  
Tracking current population interests by trends in online media of entities and topics has become increasingly popular. But while notable world events often spur online public discussion, some have been observed originating in social media postings. A natural question arises: Can analysis of social media trends be used to find mainstream newsworthy material? The work reported here takes initial steps towards answering this by investigating whether some characteristics of trending nouns and
more » ... ies originating in blogs could predict a subsequent trend in mainstream news. Results show that many trends do originate in blogs, with approximately 12% seen subsequently in news media. Frequency based ranking provides a basis for selecting the most predictive trends. The study also suggests that named entity mentions, and co-occurrences thereof, may provide more focused trends than common nouns.
doi:10.13053/rcs-90-1-20 fatcat:a4q5gwz3vverxmvzbfprxabr4y