DYNAMICS OF MEDIA ATTENTION

Abstract. Studies of human attention dynamics analyses how at-tention is focused on specific topics, issues or people. In online social media, there are clear signs of exogenous shocks, bursty dy-namics, and an exponential or powerlaw lifetime distribution. We here analyse the attention dynamics of traditional media, focussing on co-occurrence of people in newspaper articles. The results are quite different from online social networks and attention. Differ-ent regimes seem to be operating at two different time scales. At short time scales we see evidence of bursty dynamics and fast de-caying edge lifetimes and attention. This behaviour disappears for longer time scales, and in that regime we find Poissonian dynamics and slower decaying lifetimes. We propose that a cascading Poisson process may take place, with issues arising at a constant rate over a long time scale, and faster dynamics at a shorter time scale