When it Rains, it Pours: Modeling Media Storms and the News Ecosystem

Benjamin Litterer, David Jurgens, Dallas Card


Abstract
Most events in the world receive at most brief coverage by the news media. Occasionally, however, an event will trigger a media storm, with voluminous and widespread coverage lasting for weeks instead of days. In this work, we develop and apply a pairwise article similarity model, allowing us to identify story clusters in corpora covering local and national online news, and thereby create a comprehensive corpus of media storms over a nearly two year period. Using this corpus, we investigate media storms at a new level of granularity, allowing us to validate claims about storm evolution and topical distribution, and provide empirical support for previously hypothesized patterns of influence of storms on media coverage and intermedia agenda setting.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.420
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6346–6361
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.420
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.420
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Benjamin Litterer, David Jurgens, and Dallas Card. 2023. When it Rains, it Pours: Modeling Media Storms and the News Ecosystem. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 6346–6361, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
When it Rains, it Pours: Modeling Media Storms and the News Ecosystem (Litterer et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.420.pdf