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.