Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Every week, our friends at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society invite academics and other thinkers to discuss their work over lunch. Thankfully for us, they record the sessions. This week, we’re passing along some of the talks over the past few months that are most relevant to the future of news.
Today’s video: Stanford computer scientist Jure Leskovec. Leskovec, a founder of MemeTracker, studies ideas and information as they move through the news cycle on the web — and, in particular, “the set of temporal patterns by which news grows and fades over time.” Here, he discusses the findings that resulted from a three-month analysis of 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs — and the distinct “heartbeat”-like pattern that emerged to define the current MSM/blog relationship.
We wrote about MemeTracker’s findings back in July and interviewed one of Leskovec’s coauthors. Ethan Zuckerman liveblogged the talk; Leskovec posted his slides from it.
