Track the daily rhythm of the news cycle over time

bron : The New York Times 4 augustus 2009
Tracking News via Cyberspace

(…) a comprehensive and reliable database that could track the daily rhythm of the news cycle over time and was available for public use didn’t exist. So Mr. Zuckerman and others at Berkman decided to create one.
(…) For the past decade or so, many researchers have used link analysis to figure out how information spreads, said Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor at Berkman who has been involved in creating Media Cloud. You could identify which Web sites were linked to most frequently and infer whose sites were most influential. But researchers have pretty much squeezed all that they can from that approach, Mr. Benkler said. Although Media Cloud is still in its early stages, it is among “the next generation of tools that actually look at what people are saying,” he said, adding, it is “a better microscope.”
(…)

Media Cloud’s founders have put out an open call on their Web site for research ideas.
The system provides a platform.

Media Cloud:
Print newspapers are declaring bankruptcy nationwide.
High-profile blogs are proliferating.
Media companies are exploring new production techniques and business models in a landscape that is increasingly dominated by the Internet.
In the midst of this upheaval, it is difficult to know what is actually happening to the shape of our news.
Some questions:
* Do bloggers introduce storylines into mainstream media or the other way around?
* What parts of the world are being covered or ignored by different media sources?
* Where do stories begin?
* How are competing terms for the same event used in different publications?
* Can we characterize the overall mix of coverage for a given source?
* How do patterns differ between local and national news coverage?
* Can we track news cycles for specific issues?
* Do online comments shape the news?

Media Cloud offers a way to quantitatively examine all of these challenging questions.

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