MediaCloud explained: 'A platform for quantitative research on media'

Yesterday saw the launch of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society's new media tracking project, MediaCloud: a platform which allows users to track which topics are most covered by various media outlets.

Berkman fellow, Ethan Zuckerman, explains how it works in this video for the NiemanJournalismLab. Journalism.co.uk also asked Zuckerman some questions, to find out what it's all about and how users can make the most of the new site.

In a nutshell, what is it?
[EZ] It's a platform for quantitative research on media, both mainstream and citizen media. It lets you ask questions about what topics are most covered by different media outlets.  It's open - both code and data - so that people can build novel experiments on top of it.

How can I use it right now?
You can visit mediacloud.org and try three tools that we've made available ['Visualizations'; 'Share Research Ideas' and 'Keep Up to Date'].

Why use the data in this way and why's it useful?
We're focusing on quantitative data because so much discussion of media's merits and shortcomings focuses on anecdotes. We wanted people to be able to make an assertion like 'the BBC covers Africa more often than the New York Times does' and have quantitative data to back up the assertion, or challenge it.

It's useful because we're at a critical point in the history of news media. The new technologies we're introducing do some things well and other things less well. We need to ask critical questions about what's not getting reported in this new model, and how we can move to ensure we still get high quality investigative and international news. We need to have lots of discussions, brainstorms and debates, and all those conversations can benefit from better data.

How did you come up with the idea?
MediaCloud is basically the result of lots of conversations at the Berkman Center between researchers fascinated by media. We started brainstorming tools that could be general enough to answer the big questions we've been asking, and we ended up building a platform that lets researchers build their own tools.

What are the short and long term aims?
In the short term, we want to show the benefits of quantitative media analysis. This means both giving access to some simple tools online and publishing some articles about what we discover in analysing the data. I'm very interested in looking at geographic patterns of media attention and studying how they differ between blogs and mainstream media. Other colleagues are interested in political rhetoric and are using tools to follow the rise of some political memes and the fall of others.

In the long term, we're trying to build a platform that's open for everyone to use and explore. In the next few days or weeks, that means releasing code and some data under the GPL. In the long term, it means making all the data accessible through an API.

Is there the potential for other people -  individuals or organisations - to adapt these kind of tools for their own uses?
That's the whole beauty of doing it this way. We are designing the system so that researchers around the world can build tools on the platform, or so that people can build widgets that display the top topics on their favorite news sources. It won't happen tomorrow, but it's very much the goal for the platform.

You're a co-founder of GlobalVoices - will you use it there?
Perhaps, though that's not the intention. Global Voices might use it to identify blogs or newspapers that are unusually strong in international news and offer them our content. Or perhaps we should look for the weak ones instead. But this is really a research platform, while GVO is a media outlet and an activist project.

Is there anything you've found difficult to incorporate - do all news rooms allow their data to be used in same way?
Almost all blogs and newspapers have RSS feeds, which is what our system relies on. But not all do - it's very hard to incorporate information from systems that don't use RSS.

Free daily newsletter

If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).