Here is the news about news: it's old within two days

Now here's a really interesting piece of research, confirming what every journalist surely knows. A team of statistical physicists from University of Notre Dame in the US, aided by colleagues in Hungary, have analysed how people access information online and discovered that news stories on the web are barely read by anyone 36 hours after they are first posted. The short life of a news item implies that people could miss significant news by not visiting the site when a new document is first displayed, which is a good reason for publishers providing e-mail news alerts. (Via physicsweb.org)