  Studies of human attention dynamics analyses how attention is focused on
specific topics, issues or people. In online social media, there are clear
signs of exogenous shocks, bursty dynamics, and an exponential or powerlaw
lifetime distribution. We here analyse the attention dynamics of traditional
media, focussing on co-occurrence of people in newspaper articles. The results
are quite different from online social networks and attention. Different
regimes seem to be operating at two different time scales. At short time scales
we see evidence of bursty dynamics and fast decaying edge lifetimes and
attention. This behaviour disappears for longer time scales, and in that regime
we find Poissonian dynamics and slower decaying lifetimes. We propose that a
cascading Poisson process may take place, with issues arising at a constant
rate over a long time scale, and faster dynamics at a shorter time scale.
