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Patterns of news dissemination through online news media: A case study in China

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Abstract

Along with the rapid development of online news production and consumption, information spreads rapidly among news portals through reprinting and re-posting. Understanding the dissemination process of online news has important implications for policy making, crisis management, and brand imaging. As the frequency of news reprinting between two news portals expresses the social relationship between them, the topological properties of complex networks of news portals indicate the dynamic patterns of online news dissemination. This research is the first study that examines patterns and organizational structure of online news networks based on historical data collected from more than one thousand Chinese news portals. Main findings reveal that information can spread widely and rapidly through online news portals. Specifically, some major news portals exchange information with each other frequently and they exchange information with small news portals directly, implying that hot-spot events, even they are first reported by a small news portal, can be re-posted by many major news portals in a short time and then spread over the Internet quickly. The dense connections between many major news portals ensure that the spread will not be influenced greatly by the refusal to report typical events of a small part of major news portals.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge research support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 71103180, 71025001, 91124001, 91024030, 90924302, and 70890084.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Management and Control for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Youzhong Wang, Daniel Zeng, Xiaolong Zheng & Feiyue Wang

  2. Department of Management Information Systems, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Daniel Zeng

  3. College of Business, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Bin Zhu

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  1. Youzhong Wang
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  2. Daniel Zeng
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  3. Bin Zhu
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  4. Xiaolong Zheng
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  5. Feiyue Wang
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Correspondence to Daniel Zeng.

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Wang, Y., Zeng, D., Zhu, B. et al. Patterns of news dissemination through online news media: A case study in China. Inf Syst Front 16, 557–570 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-012-9358-9

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