Characterization and Early Detection of Evergreen News Articles

Abstract

Although the majority of news articles are only viewed for days or weeks, there are a small fraction of news articles that are read across years, thus named as evergreen news articles. Because evergreen articles maintain a timeless quality and are consistently of interests to the public, understanding their characteristics better has huge implications for news outlets and platforms yet there are few studies that have explicitly investigated on evergreen articles. Addressing this gap, in this paper, we first propose a flexible parameterized definition of evergreen articles to capture their long-term high traffic patterns. Using a real dataset from the Washington Post, then, we unearth several distinctive characteristics of evergreen articles and build an early prediction model with encouraging results. Although less than 1% of news articles were identified as evergreen, our model achieves 0.961 in ROC AUC and 0.172 in PR AUC in 10-fold cross validation.