New research from MEAG: News at Scale as Public Health Signal

As part of its grant-funded Health Discourse Research Initiative, MEAG conducted a research review exploring how large-scale news data is used for public health. We found that news media databases have emerged as critical tools in public health surveillance and infodemiology in the “post-API” digital landscape, in which social media data is increasingly difficult to access. The research report presents recent applications of news data from academic literature organized across four functional categories: monitoring, predicting, assessing, and augmenting for public health intelligence. Our findings demonstrate the broad utility of news databases for disease surveillance, disaster impact assessment, and computational modeling, highlighting the value of news as an open-web resource for rapid public health response.

Download the full report.