Who broke the news?: an analysis on first reports of news events

Matthias Gallé, Jean-Michel Renders, Eric Karstens

Abstract: We present a data-driven study on which sources were the first to report on news events. For this, we implemented a news-aggregator that included a large number of established news sources and covered one year of data. We present a novel framework that is able to retrieve a large number of events and not only the most salient ones, while at the same time making sure that they are not exclusively of local impact. Our analysis then focuses on different aspects of the news cycle. In particular we analyze which are the sources to break most of the news. By looking when certain events become bursty, we are able to perform a finer analysis on those events and the associated sources that dominate the global news-attention. Finally we study the time it takes news outlet to report on these events and how this reects different strategies of which news to report. A general finding of our study is that big news agencies remain an important threshold to cross to bring global attention to particular news, but it also shows the importance of focused (by region or topic) outlets.