Online news can quickly reach and affect millions of people, yet little is known about potential dynamical regularities that govern their impact on the public. By analyzing data collected from two nation-wide news outlets, we demonstrate that the impact dynamics of online news articles does not exhibit popularity patterns found in many other social and information systems. In particular, we find that the news comment count follows a universal exponential distribution which is explained by the lack of the otherwise omnipresent rich-get-richer mechanism. Exponential aging induces a universal dynamics of article impact. We finally find that the readers' collective attention does "stretch" in the presence of high-impact articles, thus effectively canceling possible competition among the articles. Our findings challenge the generality of widespread popularity dynamics patterns as well as common assumptions of attention economy, suggesting the need to critically reconsider the assumption that collective attention is inherently limited.

中文翻译：

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在线新闻影响的普遍模式

在线新闻可以迅速到达并影响数百万人，但人们对控制其对公众影响的潜在动态规律知之甚少。通过分析从两个全国性新闻媒体收集的数据，我们证明了在线新闻文章的影响动态并未表现出在许多其他社会和信息系统中发现的流行模式。特别是，我们发现新闻评论数量遵循普遍指数分布，这是由于缺乏无处不在的富人变富机制所致。指数老化导致文章影响的普遍动态。我们最终发现，在高影响力文章的存在下，读者的集体注意力确实“伸展”了，从而有效地消除了文章之间可能的竞争。