Basic chemical engineering and processes control tools were utilized to describe the flow of news information in the Internet. Data on the news coverage of scientific articles provided by Altmetric were analyzed for six chemistry journals. The timecourse of the news was modeled using linear system dynamics, resulting in an interpretable description of the timescales involved. The model was additionally tested by applying it to the flow of nonscientific news information. An investigation on the distribution of news items per scientific article further identified online news generation as a preferential growth process. The model results allowed a discussion on scientific impact in public media and an analysis on how this impact can be influenced by authors and journals. In respect to the field of engineering, the work shows that traditional ChemE and process control tools developed for the abstraction of physical and chemical systems can also be utilized to describe social and information related processes. (c) 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 62: 1104-1111, 2016