The Berkman Center for Internet & Societ at Harvard launched a new system/application in March that follows media trends. Media Cloud takes articles–each day–from an astounding amount of news media and blogs and stores the information in a database. Users can then visit the Media Cloud website and chart this data. While this is not a finished product, it is an interesting and innovative way to study media. Journalists, communication researchers, news enthusiasts and average Joes are able to explore media trends easily without having to actually gather the data. The Berkman Center has done this for us, taking out a time-consumng step and allowing us to focus on the content. This is valuable because we can, in turn, improve the quality of journalism. Hopefully, ethics committees and news media will utilize Media Cloud to optimize journalism.
I encourage you to check out Media Cloud yourself, but below is some interesting information.
TOP 3 TOPICS
CNN: United States, Washington, California
Fox News: New York, Florida, Texas
MSNBC: Afghanistan, Taliban, Mexico
The New York Times: United States, Washington, California
The Washington Post: Virginia, United States, New York
The Wall Street Journal: New York, China, Washington
I find it interesting that CNN and The New York Times (both considerably left-sided) had identical Top 3.