how does a news cycle operate

A 2009 research paper (J. Leskovec, L. Backstrom and J. Kleinberg. The Dynamics of the News Cycle.) on the 2008 presidential election, found that

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.

I'm not sure if today's social media really changed that.

They made a calendar with the dominating news (based on tracking a phrase) of the day(s).

(see inside the paper for a bigger version of the graph)

I've seen a similar graph for the 2016 election.

It would be interesting to have an up-to-date version of such a calendar graph for all serious (political-social) news stories, worldwide.

How does a story diffuse across mainstream media? I imagine it starts with news providers like AP, Reuters, etc. A few big newspapers/tv-channels editors select a story, and the rest of the smaller competitors (also in the sense of the big media of other/smalller countries) just follows/repeats. That is, I imagine it in a quite centralised way. Perhaps this gives rise to a conspiratorial picture. It would nevertheless be interesting if it is possible to determine what media companies have the power to set in motion the (worldwide) news cycle, and ultimately to trace it back to some conscious decision by an editor.

Not much research on this

Not much research on this apparently.

Paterson, Chris (2005) 'News agency dominance in international news on the internet', in D. Skinner, J. Compton and M. Gasher (eds.), Converging Media, Diverging Politics: A Political Economy of News in the United States and Canada.

Paterson in 2005

..For example, it is likely that e-journalism is not especially interactive, and by extension, not more accountable to audiences than traditional media: that it is rarely diverse or pluralist, and by extension, not ideologically alternative: that is not terribly original in content (as shown in the present study, with 43 to 60 percent of "original" content actually originating in the newsrooms of AP and Reuters) [...]

Paterson, Chris & Domingo, David (eds.) 2008, Making Online News (Volume 1): The Ethnography of New Media Production.

– 2011, Making Online News (Volume 2): Newsroom Ethnographies in the Second Decade of Internet Journalism.. (ToC)

Owen, John & Purdey, Heather 2011, International News Reporting: Frontlines and Deadlines.

Nigel Baker in 2011

Research for AP by PQ Media shows that the global market for editorial 'outsourced content' – text, video photos and graphics – sold by agencies and syndicators is set to rise from $5.6 billion in 2006 to $7.8 billion in 2011.

I understand, from a friend

I understand, from a friend who has worked at a news agency, that the reach is huge and the origin of the article is often obscured with the local journalist putting their name under a copypasta article. The way newspapers are run these days journalists are very happy to print anything that is timely and ready, hence the frequency of press releases being published as news.

The news agency covers what the editor wants covered so they can clearly be powerful but they are in turn employed so trying to please some other boss.

RedKahina's stuff here on

RedKahina's stuff here on Marx's media analysis is interesting:

http://qlipoth.blogspot.com/2014/09/marx-does-media-analysis-1-recent.html
http://qlipoth.blogspot.com/2014/09/marxdoes-media-analysis-2-inthe-months.html