Researchers at Cornell University have recently completed a huge study of 1.6 million news sites in which they tracked news stories in the three months leading up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election. They tracked stories on mainstream media sites as well as blogs, and saw some very interesting results. You can read about the study in detail at the Cornell Chronicle, but here are a few highlights:

• “They found a consistent rhythm as stories rose into prominence and then fell off over just a few days, with a “heartbeat” pattern of handoffs between blogs and mainstream media.”
• “In mainstream media, they found, a story rises to prominence slowly then dies quickly; in the blogosphere, stories rise in popularity very quickly but then stay around longer, as discussion goes back and forth.”
• “When a story first appears, there is a small rise in activity in both spheres; as mainstream activity increases, the proportion blogs contribute becomes small; but soon the blog activity shoots up, peaking an average of 2.5 hours after the mainstream peak.”

And the most interesting nugget, hidden towards the end of this article:

“Almost all stories started in the mainstream. Only 3.5 percent of the stories tracked appeared first dominantly in the blogosphere and then moved to the mainstream.”

This confirms something I have strongly suspected for a while. There’s a lot of talk about how mainstream media and institutionalized journalism have become unnecessary because everything can be done by bloggers, everything can be crowdsourced, etc., etc. But how to reconcile that with the fact that bloggers’ reporting is all based on stories from the mainstream media and institutionalized journalists? There is a clear dependence here that is being ignored. I wonder what would a day or a week without The New York Times look like in the blogosphere?