Media Cloud

Media Cloud
Media Cloud analysis of top 25 U.S. news sources' coverage of Occupy Wall Street for the week of September 26, 2011, compared with week of October 3, 2011

Media Cloud is an open-source content analysis tool that aims to map news media coverage of current events. It "performs five basic functions -- media definition, crawling, text extraction, word vectoring, and analysis."[1] It "tracks hundreds of newspapers and thousands of Web sites and blogs, and archives the information in a searchable form. The database ... enable[s] researchers to search for key people, places and events — from Michael Jackson to the Iranian elections — and find out precisely when, where and how frequently they are covered."[2] Media Cloud was developed by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and launched in March 2009.[3][4]

As of October 2011, Media Cloud tracks news from mostly U.S. sources. It "collects news stories" in sets from:[5]

  • "Top 25 mainstream media sources from the U.S. according to the Google Ad Planner service" (includes New York Times, BBC, etc.)
  • "1000 most influential U.S. political blogs according to Technorati" (examples include Outside the Beltway [1])
  • "1000 most popular feeds in Bloglines" (such as Gawker)
  • "All public feeds from whitehouse.gov"

References

Berkman Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
  1. ^ Media Cloud. About. Retrieved 2011-10-12
  2. ^ Patricia Cohen. "Hot Story to Has-Been: Tracking News via Cyberspace." New York Times, August 5, 2009
  3. ^ Berkman Center. Media Cloud. Retrieved 2011-10-12
  4. ^ Alisa Miller. Media Makeover: Improving the News One Click At a Time. TED Books, 2011
  5. ^ Media Cloud. Media sets. Retrieved 2011-10-12
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