Media Cloud Makes Media Research Easier
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, along with Thomson Reuters introduced a new online news source analytics site that has the makings of an entrenched resource for researchers, editors, and blogger worldwide.
The Berkman Thomson site is called Media Cloud. The founders explain it to be a handy research, and information tool that aggregates analytics, in spite the changes media has gone through and is going through (new media vs. traditional). “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” Yochai Benkler ‘94, faculty co-director of the Berkman Center.
We found our walk through of Media Cloud to be quite interesting. We were able to pick key topics of interest to us, search them through Media Cloud and the media sources they’ve archived, and see what common terms appear in all. In this case, I agree with the site originators in that Media Cloud becomes an amazing research tool. Your results can be served up in various ways: Top 10 terms used most in your chosen media, Pivot table showing your key item and related words used in your chosen media, and a World map showing cities of coverage by depth and by news source. What makes the data so rich is that Media Cloud covers a few global players, so your results are never continent or country biased. In essence then, Media Cloud is a pile of algorithms applied to its archived and current media news served up analytics style.
There are no doubts that many other search terms and pathing on results can be added to what Media Cloud has already started. Based on all that they have done to date, I assume the site owners are gathering user data, trends and search habits and that all of this research will be used when they move into making Media Cloud Phase Two, but for now, it still is a site worth bookmarking.
