Mar 3, 2010
March 3rd, 2010 by Paul Bradshaw
There’s a fascinating study on newspaper bias by University of Chicago professors Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro which identifies the political bias of particular newspapers based on the frequency with which certain phrases appear.
The professors then correlate that placement with the political leanings of the newspaper’s own markets, and find
“That the most important variable is the political orientation of people living within the paper’s market. For example, the higher the vote share received by Bush in 2004 in the newspaper’s market (horizontal axis below), the higher the Gentzkow-Shapiro measure of conservative slant (vertical axis).”
Interestingly, ownership is found to be statistically insignificant once those other factors are accounted for.
James Hamilton, blogging about the study, asks:
“How slant gets implemented at the ground level by individual reporters. My guess is that most reporters know that they are introducing some slant in the way they’ve chosen to frame and report a story, but are unaware of the full extent to which they do so because they are underestimating the degree to which the other sources from which they get their information and beliefs have all been doing a similar filtering. The result is social networks that don’t recognize that they have developed a groupthink that is not centered on the truth.” [my emphasis]
In other words, the ‘echo chamber’ argument (academics would call it a discourse) that we’ve heard made so many times about the internet.
It’s nice to be reminded that social networks are not an invention of the web, but rather the other way around.
h/t Azeem Azhar
Aug 3, 2009
August 3rd, 2009 by Vadim Lavrusik
(Editor’s Note: This is the first in a three-part series on local online news video. The first focuses on content. Tomorrow’s part two will explore design and usability and part three will take a look at advertising.)
Though local news sites have expanded their production of content and made great strides in technological advances on their video platforms, they haven’t exactly reached the next threshold or industry standard in online video. In many cases, this “standard” is being set by media giants like CNN and user-generated social media sites like YouTube. In fact, a recent study shows that watching online video is more popular than Facebook or Twitter. The trend is continuing in that direction and the time spent watching online video has increased as well. And with YouTube now getting into the local news business with its News Near You feature that will grab news clips from sources that are 100 miles from your computer’s IP address, local news organizations should worry.
Many of the local news sites are still experimenting and beginning to define the type of video content they would like to produce. Below are lessons learned from a thesis study that examined how 10 local news sites in the Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, USA market used online video. The conclusions made here, are also gathered through interviews of editors at the respective organizations (Note: Several did not want or could not appear for publication as a result of organizational policies). The full study can be found here (beware it is about 60 pages in length). Below are the sites studied. However, I will also note that the study did not include TheUpTake, which actually provided a lot of online video content for many of the sites below and has had led some great innovations in online video.
[Read more]
May 15, 2008
May 15th, 2008 by Paul Bradshaw
Alex Gamela looks at citizen journalism – or the lack of it – in the Portuguese media landscape
We’ve been watching a significant change in the Portuguese news media during the last few years. From national to local newspapers, radios and TV channels, everyone is building their presence online, with more or less aptitude or quality. Still, the effort is noticeable.
 Portugal Diário is a exclusively online outlet that has recently gone through a deep redesign.
|
But this investment in new platforms of communication doesn’t mean the companies are following the latest trends, or leaving their somewhat conservative approach to the full possibilities of the web. The news websites in Portugal are mostly a repository for print content, since many don’t have exclusively online journalists, and the resources for online content are rather limited, especially as multimedia content is concerned, though slowly the tide is turning, mainly due to the efforts of major newspapers, that are trying to improve and take the step forward in online content.
This scenario, of slow and uneven development of new media content, is useful to explain why the interactivity between media and users is practically nonexistent. Many still don’t grasp the concept of participative/citizen journalism and community, but companies and newsroom managements aren’t the only ones to blame, since there are other factors to consider: [Read more]
Mar 23, 2008
March 23rd, 2008 by nicolaskb
The cartograms below show the world through the eyes of editors-in-chief, in 2007. Countries swell as they receive more media attention; others shrink as we forget them.
[Read more]
Newspaper bias: just another social network
