Cutline Speaks

Berkman Center at Harvard Launches Media Analysis Tool

posted by Morgan on March 12, 2009

I've always been fascinated by a news cycle - how a story moves from one media outlet to the next and is re-reported in different forms. I've also spent many hours tracking this cycle for work when doing media analysis, which typically involves reading hundreds of articles to identify trends. So, it should be no surprise that Media Cloud, a new tool that launched this week, caught my attention because of the potential is has to be a valuable tool for communication professionals. 

Ethan Zuckerman, one of the people behind the project describes Media Cloud as "a very large set of data, as well as some simple tools for playing with it, obtained by subscribing to and processing hundreds of American blogs and a couple hundred newspapers in English from around the world."

Media Cloud's focus is to make quantitative data available, so you can use it in media research. Here's how it works:  

"We subscribe to the RSS feeds of a variety of newspapers and blogs. We grab every single story that is publish. We then pull the story text out of the HTML, which is an interesting hack. We throw the story text into a bunch of different tools that helps them determine what the stories are about. So we're able to get topic information. We're able to get information on people mentioned in the stories — what’s called named entities."

"And then we file this all off in a database. So if you then want to find out what the stories were on Fox News for a given week, we can tell you what the top-10 topics were. We can also go levels further and say: When a news source reported on a topic, what other topics were most closely associated with it?"

While the site seems to be in beta, you can start playing around with a few tools. For example, I used the top 10 pivot table to find out the top 10 phrases used around the term "education" in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.  From the results, it looks like the San Francisco Chronicle used the word "education" in articles that also touched on Silda Hollis and Obama. So, I could start to answer questions like: what does education coverage look like in the San Francisco Chronicle? I can roughly conclude that the paper is focused on covering education policy. 

I'm curious to see how this tool develops over time as it gets more robust, especially around its potential to be an extremely useful tool for communication professionals doing media research, pitching and PR planning (just to name a few areas). To read more on this project, including what to expect in the future, check out the rest of Ethan's interview in this blog post. Also, be sure you visit the Media Cloud site to contribute your research ideas. The comments section is a good read, too. 

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