Centrality of News Article in the Blogosphere.

This paper proposes a theory about the centrality of news articles in the blogosphere. The proposed theory hypothesizes that both newsworthiness of events and prominence of articles on a news website are positively related with centrality of news articles in the blogosphere, and that perceived personal expertise moderates these relationships such that original correlations are diminished with the existence of bloggers' perceived personal expertise. Two dimensions of newsworthiness are considered: deviance of the news event, and social significance of the news event. Two dimensions of centrality of news article are considered: article popularity in the blogosphere, and article importance within blog entries.Empirical data from a content analysis of the most-blogged-about articles on The New York Times' website in 2008 show that deviance of news events is significantly correlated with article popularity, whereas social significance of news events is significantly correlated with article importance within blog entries. Personal expertise only moderates one relationship: it eliminates the original direction of the relationship between social significance of news events and article importance in blog entries. The findings contribute to the understanding of the news media-blogosphere relationship, and also validate the active role of bloggers suggested in recent literature. The empirical data also suggest new directions to refine the proposed theory regarding the relationship between different dimensions of the construct newsworthiness and different dimensions of the construct centrality of news article in the blogosphere. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]