‘MEDIA CLOUD’ Project to Aid Research on Media Trends, the Blogosphere and News Industry Dynamics

Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society has teamed with Thomson Reuters to support the new ‘Media Cloud’ open research tool - a resource that will offer unprecedented insight into the flow of online media as well as powerful interfaces to bring the data to life. Media Cloud was inspired by the debate over whether the blogosphere largely echoed traditional media or was instead a source for original news and democratic agenda-setting.

“While daily newspapers struggle for survival, political, niche and special interest blogs continue to thrive,” said Yochai Benkler, Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Center. “In the midst of this upheaval, it is difficult to know where stories begin, who sets the agenda, and how these dramatic changes impact news coverage on the whole. We created Media Cloud to help researchers and the public get quantitative answers to these challenging questions.”

Found at http://www.mediacloud.org, Media Cloud offers a way to quantitatively examine complex questions about the shape and flow of news coverage in the Internet era, such as:

* What types of stories are covered by which media sources?
* Where do particular news stories begin?
* What areas of the world garner attention, and which do not?
* How does the blogosphere's coverage of an issue compare to the mainstream media?
* What role do comments and other participatory channels on the Web play in setting the news or political agenda?

Media Cloud will comprise an ever-growing archive of news stories and blog posts that have been analyzed using the Thomson Reuters Calais Web service.  Relevant people, places, companies, facts and events will be automatically tagged to support exploration in relation to the rest of the network of media sources.  Users will be able to query this dynamic catalog and generate revealing visualizations to show, for instance, how sources cluster or diverge, where new news stories come from, and what new media flows are emerging.

“We are extremely pleased to be working with Harvard University and the Berkman Center in support of this valuable research tool,” said Barak Pridor, CEO, ClearForest, the Thomson Reuters company that produces the Calais Web Service.  “Media Cloud will help map the interaction between mainstream media and the blogosphere to reveal how people influence, shape and interact with news stories today.”

To learn more about Media Cloud, visit: http://mediacloud.org.

To learn about the Thomson Reuters Calais initiative, visit: http://OpenCalais.com.