The nerds behind Memetracker, which builds maps around news streams, have a new paper, "Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle," which claims, according to a NYT story, that "the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours." I would say the methodology looks flawed, but it just so happens that this story came out exactly 2.5 hours ago.
The key flaw is that their criteria for distinguishing between mainstream media and blogs is whether a source is indexed by Google News. Which, of course, ends up labeling a lot of blogs from Daily Kos to Wonkette as mainstream media. But that's not so much a flaw of the study, which was intended to demonstrate a meme-tracking technique, as it is a flaw with the NYT article, which doesn't mention the dubious methodology.
posted by Zach Seward at 11:33 PM on July 12, 2009 
OK, here's my corrective to the Times article: "In the news cycle, memes spread more like a heartbeat than a virus." Scott Rosenberg also tweaked the Times, and Chris Anderson (not of Wired) has good research to add as well.
posted by Zach Seward at 7:04 PM on July 13, 2009
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