Visualizations
Update: February 2nd, 2009
You can use this form to create charts showing information about different media sources. The Media Cloud system identifies relevant terms from news stories and allows you to do analysis of that data. Try it. If you find something interesting, leave a comment below.
mcvizresults
It would be cool if you could see the name of a country when you roll over it – for the geographically challenged among us.
I really like this global coverage comparison of NYT, TPM, and BBC. Look how much less attention TPM pays to most of the world! Also, BBC focuses (not surprisingly) more on the UK than the US. I guess we’re not the center of the universe after all.
Comparing NYT, Al Jazeera English, and Xinhua, it becomes all the more apparently how lacking China’s coverage of anywhere else in the world is — as well as how obsessed they are with the U.S.
This is just a design note, but you should make the submit button stand out more–perhaps relocating it slightly? When you already have results, it kind of disappears in the page.
Democracy Now would be nice to include.
[We just added to the tracker and it will start showing up in a day or so. --Ed]
I seem to be getting a lot of reporter’s names in my tests.
Seems there aren’t any Canadian news sources. CBC and the Globe and Mail would be two that should be in any database. Much more interesting for Americans to see what their (invisible) neighbours think about the world than the interests of those half a world away.
[Good point. We'll add them. --Ed]
Who makes the call on what news sources are included?
[Currently we have to add them manually but ultimately we want this to be open. If you want something added, just let us know. --Ed.]
Just did a Top 10 comparison of 3 New York papers: NY Times, Newsday, and New York Post. Interesting results but there is no explanation of the dates of coverage being analyzed. Are results based on today’s stories? All stories in Media Cloud’s database (if so, what are the dates of coverage for each source)?
[Good point. Currently the coverage is for the past 90 days. We'll make this more clear -Ed]
I think this is great work. A question: Many people now get their news from aggregators like Huffington Post. How do you plan to incorporate these second-tier news providers, who, although may not be doing primary research/reporting, are making decisions on what stories to present to their audience in the same way that the New York Times does.
Is it possible to select a search function for blogs? And if it is possible, how are the blogs that are searched selected (in other words, who determines what blogs are to be searched)? A friend and I have just started a site that aims to review Nigerian blogs/ blogs on Nigeria and it would be really good if we could, say, do a search for particular subjects here, and then review sites that come up. What do you think?
Loomnie.
[It is not possible to select specific sets of sources within this interface, but it is absolutely possible to do with the system. We have done some of this internally, but we don't yet have a public interface to it. Right now we have to manually choose which blogs are tracked, but we'd like your suggestions. Contact us at info-AT_mediacloud.org for more info and options to collaborate. -Ed.]
Any chance of adding the following: Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC); Sydney Morning Herald; The Age (Melbourne Australia); and SBS (Special Broadcasting Service, Australia)? Many thanks, and thanks for doing such a great project.
[Yep, we'll add them. Thanks! -Ed.]
It would be great if I could embed a dynamic visualization on my website. I’m a librarian and I think this content would be great for my students.
In these maps Iran is always in white – but surely this must just be some odd artifact of the data?
Does this factor in internet availability to the home? Within each market, I suspect that coverage is tied to the availability of broadband penetration to the home, which typically ranges between 1-8% in the top 30 emerging markets.
Some news sources are showing high rankings for extraneous terms. For example, San Francisco Chronicle — “Associated Press” is in there, presumably because it’s in story text as a source, not because they are writing a lot about the Associated Press. St. Paul Pioneer Press — “Pioneer Press” is the top-ranked term for the same reason.
how about the ability to do some simple boolean logic operations…
You don’t seem to use any Japanese sources (or at least they don’t show up in the “source” list). A phenomenal amount of news media originates in Japan, and some of the biggest (Yomiuri, Asahi, Nikkei, Mainichi, NHK, and others) publish English language editions. You’d get a very distorted view of the world if they were not included.
How about some built-in sets of media sources so that we could select one without having to recall or type any names? It would be nice if we could select a built-in set and then also modify it. Built-in sets would also reduce the problem of typing in the name of a source only to find that you don’t yet support it.
Please add Jornal do Brasil, Estado de Sao Paulo, Estado de Minas, Folha de Sao Paulo, O Globo.
If one enters an obscure term for a “Top 10 term pivot” report, nothing comes back. That’s the right output, but it’s almost impossible to distinguish visually from a failure to process the input. It would help to see an informative message like, “Media Cloud found no stories in your sources using your term.”
please add some arts publications so we could track where artists (often in the forefront) are creating works in response to geopolitical instability
How about a keyword chart? For instance, I am more concerned with the subjects being discussed, and then the source of that discussion. So if I enter a keyword “soda”, I’d like a chart that displays how much discussion there is regarding that topic. Then I’d be interested in what media source(s) is writing/blogging about it. But very cool tool you’ve developed here.
The Australian http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/ would be good to see too.
This site looks like it has a lot of promise; but are you planning to implement further visualization and analysis of the data you gather? The concept of reviewing the output of three news sources, while interesting, is somewhat limited when you consider the wealth of data available to you. It would be really fascinating to apply visualizations like those used by Digg Labs to the kind of data you are processing here. Anything that monitors what is happening while it is happening, so to speak. Keep up the good work!
[Yes, absolutely. We're also looking for other researchers to collaborate with. These visualizations are a very simple demo. - Ed.]
Great site! Please add Democracy Now when you get a chance.
Can you please also add Indian media channels? Primarily the big newspapers – The Times of India, the Hindu, The Hindustan Times, The Deccan Chronicle, etc and the big TV channels – NDTV, CNN-IBN, etc.
It’s quite weird to see from the map that Global Voices Online put such heavy wight on US while actually it doesn’t.
Please add: The Irish Times, The Sunday Times (Ireland), The Sunday Business Post, The Sunday Tribune, The Irish Independent, The Independent, The Irish Examiner, The Sunday Independent
It would be great to include Canadian media outlets – like CBC Radio and Television, The Globe & Mail, Maclean’s – at least the big ones in the short-term. It would also be great if users could request monitoring of one that doesn’t appear on your drop-down list. That way, people could use it to understand even local media context.
Agree – I was surprised not to find aggregators like Huffington and The Drudge Report! A key news source trend.
Could the jerusalem post and haaretz.com be added?
I can’t seem to get the term pivot query to work this morning. I keep getting a blank scree. Using 3 midwest newspapers and the term economy.
Didn’t work on Mac Firefox. For those of us in the web design world, this won’t be a valuable resource until it works cross-platform and on all major browsers. Great idea, bad execution so far.
Noting that you carry Al-Jazeera and other ethno-religious news sources, perhaps you could include the major Israeli or Jewish news sources: say, Ha’aretz for the major (leftist) paper, or Jerusalem Post (center-right), those being the two largest English papers, or the Jewish Telegraphic Agency JTA.org), a Jewish wire service that supplies stories to Jewish newspapers throughout the US. Jerusalem Post is probably one of the longest-running papers (always in English) in the region, since 1932 when it was founded as the Palestine Post.
I think you guys need to raise the hood on this so folks can help you tweak it.
It doesn’t tell me a lot that the top 10 for my paper is Missouir, United States and Illinois. I am more interested in Economy v. politics. v. recipes. So – one of the first things I would ask is how can I filter out the geographic designations and focus on subject alone.
[Absolutely. This is coming. -Ed.]
Could you possibly add:
news.com.au
heraldsun.com.au
couriermail.com.au
perthnow.com.au
adelaidenow.com.au
dailytelegraph.com.au
And thanks for creating the project. Looking forward to seeing it evolve.
[Will do. -Ed.]
Just trying this out. Looks promising.
Hope can search in chinese, u know, there is eager demand in china for this
Excellent, the tracking and clarification potential is incredible. Hopefully it will enable distinguishing in detail those colluding to deceive versus those communicating to inform. The end being healthy, honest journalism.
Keep at it.
Peter Lott Heppner
Chicago
Great work. Can’t wait to see how it develops. There’s Gulf News and The National from the United Arab Emirates.
Fascinating! But just fyi, just in case, there aren’t any results for Xinhua in terms of top 10 most mentioned terms. I believe Xinhua will play a more interesting role in the future and would like to see it well represented.
Since the advent of Google News its been easy for the common reader to observe the strong correlation between AP wire leads and eventual broad based coverage in the US press (and blogs). Would be interesting to research or represent that somehow. Many news outlets have lost their independence with declining resources.
Moreover, I find that the British leads are also quite influential vs. the international story choices (and POV) of US News Outlets. There is an editorial bias that may be worth studying (noted as a European American NOT of British ethnic heritage – I’m white but NOT Anglo!).
While we (again English speakers) may feel we are now living with greater access to more news than ever before, my hunch is the opposite is occurring – MORE outlets distributing ever LESS news. Result being we are chattering louder about fewer stories.
It may be worthwhile representing how much we English speakers have wound up living on a very small news island indeed.
It would be highly challenging to cover non-English sources effectively but I would like to see a more representative picture of coverage by selecting three or so truly original sources of news from each major G20 country: NY Times, Le Monde (France), Bild (Germany), Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan), Corriere della Sera (Milan) are some papers that come to mind.
It would be important to weed out uses of wire stories (and British and American leads) and focus truly on original editorial.
I moved to South Africa and I am very interested to know if your mediacloud will eventually include key news media from the continent. There’s always so much taking place and it happens so fast. Foreign policies hs a significant impact on the lives of women and children…it would be nice to have a system like mediacloud that can help track significant and relevant news. An intelligent tool, now I just have to learn how to use it. Peace out.
I forgot to mention in terms of a constructive input, the results needs to be bigger, bolder, brighter for easy viewing. As it is now, it’s difficult to read. And, I agree with Sarah that it would be nice to also include CBC radio and so on. Obrigado!
Selecting Agence France Presse doesn’t seem to work correctly.
Also, could you add European sources such as EuroNews, France24 and Deutsche Welle ?
Thanks
Please cab you include the major UK broadsheets? For example: The Times (London), The Independent, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times.
Also, could you include a group of science publications? Nature, Science, New Scientist, Scientific American
Really like this tool and look forward to its development! Thanks
Any plans to include any of Britain’s biggest selling newspapers? (The Sun, Daily Mail, The Mirror, Express etc)
This would result in fascinating data …
[Yes, absolutely. -Ed.]
. . .
I see from one of the earlier posters that weblinks show up so:
http://www.independent.co.uk
http://www.telegraph.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk
also, from our part of the world
http://www.nzherald.co.nz
http://www.dompost.co.nz
http://www.rnzi.com
http://www.pina.com.fj (may not convert easily to feed)
thanks for an awesome service!
jason
. . .
Hello
This is a fantastic tool! Could I just suggest to add euronews to your list of media?