I am quite the fan of Duncan Watts’ ideas on the unpre­dict­ably of trends. They get another out­ing at Fast Com­pany:

“If soci­ety is ready to embrace a trend, almost any­one can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts con­cludes. To suc­ceed with a new product, it’s less a mat­ter of find­ing the per­fect hip­ster to infect and more a mat­ter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she gen­er­ally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s ter­min­o­logy, an “acci­dental Influential.”

Per­haps the prob­lem with viral mar­ket­ing is that the dis­ease meta­phor is mis­lead­ing. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thou­sands a year, but only a few become roar­ing mon­sters. That’s because in those rare situ­ations, the land­scape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire depart­ments. If these con­di­tions exist, any old match will do. “And nobody,” Watts says wryly, “will go around talk­ing about the excep­tional prop­er­ties of the spark that star­ted the fire.”

If we believe Watts, what are the con­sequences for news? And what makes a story massive?

Here are my thoughts:

• A news story needs to meet cer­tain entry criteria.
• Impact (i.e. the amount of report­ing) is not adequately explained by the way in which it meets those cri­teria — its innate “newsworthiness”
• Impact is bet­ter explained by context.

So much for the gatekeepers.