Tracking the Temporal Dynamics of News Coverage of Catastrophic and Violent Events
For researchers and analysts studying media framing and public discourse during crises, this work provides a quantitative framework to track narrative evolution.
This study analyzes 126,602 news articles to quantify temporal and semantic dynamics of reporting on violent and catastrophic events, finding structured patterns with rapid coverage surges, early semantic drift, and gradual declines.
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.