Media Statistics
I have commented for some time about how the traditional media generates articles: fewer on the weekend and more during the work week. And this was undoubtedly either boring or obvious to everyone. But about three months ago I switched RSS aggregators and started gathering some data on the RSS feeds I subscribe to. Now this data isn’t particularly detailed, mostly things like how many articles each feed has each day and how many of them I actually bring up in my browser.
I now have enough to start crunching and doing some analysis, and there have been some "Uh Hunh"s and "Duhh"s and "Oh Yeah"s coming forth already. The biggie thus far has to do with a difference between American and English news feeds. The American feeds are traditional newspapers like the New Yawk Times and the Chicago Tribune; the English feeds include the BBC, the Guardian, and the Register.
Statistically, there is very little difference between these feeds as groups/nationalities on some days of the week, specifically, Tuesday-Thursday and Saturday-Sunday. Both have flows that have consistent numbers of articles T-Th and S-S although these flows are different. As previously noted the S-S flow is considerably lower than the T-Th.
Now for the thunker. The English media flows M-F are consistent. That is, the flows on M and F are not statistically different than T-Th. This is not the case with the American media. they have M,F flows that are intermediary between their T-Th and S-S flows.
To quote Doyle, "The Game is afoot." We can try to figure out the "why" on this.
