Finding Narratives in News Flows:The Temporal Dimension of News Stories

Previous studies indicate that the capacity of media to influence the salience of issues in the public realm is strongly dependent on specific attributes that characterize these issues. In this work, we investigate two internal aspects of issue types related to the attribute of duration. First, we address whether news stories belonging to different issue types can be identified and represented using a set of quantifiable temporal dimensions (i.e. lifespan, intensity, and burstiness). Second, we conduct a qualitative analysis to investigate whether news stories of different issue types have different narrative patterns, regardless of their specific topic. We use a corpus of 50,385 political news articles in Spanish from 2018 as a case study, and propose a novel system to aggregate the articles into stories. Our results show that stories belonging to different issue types do have distinguishing behaviours, especially along the intensity dimension. At the same time, the qualitative analysis indicates a tendency to associate narrative patterns to issue types. This analysis shows the potential of using news stories as research units to study framing strategies