Tracking the Temporal Dynamics of News Coverage of Catastrophic and Violent Events

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how news coverage of violent and catastrophic events evolves over time, revealing structured patterns in volume and semantics through large-scale data analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive framework for quantifying and understanding the temporal and semantic dynamics of news reporting during crises.

Findings

Sudden impactful events show rapid coverage surges and early semantic drift.

News narratives follow predictable patterns with gradual declines.

Identifies key terms driving the temporal patterns.

Abstract

The modern news cycle has been fundamentally reshaped by the rapid exchange of information online. As a result, media framing shifts dynamically as new information, political responses, and social reactions emerge. Understanding how these narratives form, propagate, and evolve is essential for interpreting public discourse during moments of crisis. In this study, we examine the temporal and semantic dynamics of reporting for violent and catastrophic events using a large-scale corpus of 126,602 news articles collected from online publishers. We quantify narrative change through publication volume, semantic drift, semantic dispersion, and term relevance. Our results show that sudden events of impact exhibit structured and predictable news-cycle patterns characterized by rapid surges in coverage, early semantic drift, and gradual declines toward the baseline. In addition, our results indicate the terms that are driving the temporal patterns.