Analyzing and Predicting Persistence of News Tweets

Abstract

News is read and consumed differently based on its topic and timeliness to the reader. Some stories attract readers immediately after they are published, while others capture readership consistently over multiple days after their publication, regardless of their overall popularity. This paper studies this less explored facet of news story consumption, which we name persistence, operationalized as the time for a story to reach a certain percent of its total interest. In particular, we study persistence though a novel, publicly available data set of news tweets from 353 news outlets. We perform an extensive linguistic analysis of persistence in social media to uncover the underlying topical and stylistic cues that impact short-or long-term interest in a story. We train several models for predicting persistence that achieve predictive performance of up to 0.353 Spearman correlation when extrapolating to tweets from days unseen in training and retain significant predictive performance even on tweets from accounts unseen in training. The ability to predict news persistence can be useful in several practical applications that drive news and social media consumption including alerting, search ranking or recommendations.