‘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.