News Ecosystem Analysis: Shift to Networked Media in SF Bay Area, Slides of Data Communication Systems and Computer Networks

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San Francisco Bay Area News

Ecology

Outline

• Introduction
• Related Work
• Methodology
• Conclusion

Role of Journalists

• Traditional Reporting
  • Journalists worked mostly alone and locally.
  • National/International news from other organizations (Associated Press).
• Network Media Reporting
  • Journalists can easily talk to others across the globe.
  • They can freelance for many news outlets.

Project Goals

• Use network analysis to characterize a “news

ecosystem”.

• Traditional news outlets are shrinking.
• Start-up news organizations are quickly forming.
• Using the San Francisco Bay area.
• Transitioning from “mass media” to “networked media”?

Related Work

• I. Himelboim, “The International Network

Structure of News Media: An Analysis of

Hyperlinks Usage in News Web sites”

• Analyzed 6,298 foreign news stories.
• 223 news web sites.
• 73 countries.
• Studied use of external hyperlinks.

Related Work (Cont.)

• Found news sites rarely used external

hyperlinks.

• Only 6% had one or more.
• If they did, it followed patterns based on:
• Preferential Attachment Theorem
• World System Theory
• Conclusions
• Journalists trained to not reveal sources.
• Distrust for outside sources.
• Lead users away from the news site.

Related Work (Cont.)

• Conclusion
  • Organizations are authorities.
  • Micropublishers and organizations are hubs.
  • Organizations are intermediaries and switchboards.
• Organizations are most prestigious.

Methodology

• Use network theory to study three main ties:
  • News Organization to News Organization
  • Journalists to the “Community”
  • Commenters to News Organizations

News Organization Ties

• Won’t record duplicates, but will record

number of references.

• News Organization graphs will be generated

from the database.

• Nodes are websites.
• Edges are directional hyperlink references.
• Edge weights are number of times linked.

News Organization Ties

• Categorizing Links
  • First pass will be try to categorize news sites if they match the seed site list.
  • Second pass will require manual human coding
    • Remove all links deemed not a news organization
• Merge all independent networks together.

Journalists to the Community

• Determine the linking patterns of reporters

who publish on the seed sites.

• Traditional writing versus using the web to its full potential.
• Use a web crawler to crawl the seed sites and

record all external links to a database.

• Focus on only a few larger sites.
• No standard for bylines of article authors.
• Requires site specific crawling rules.

Journalists to the Community

• Journalist graph will be generated from the

database.

• Forms a bipartite graph.
• Nodes are authors and sites.
• Edges are an author linking a site.
• Some manual human coding required to remove non-community sites.

Commenters to News Organizations

• Determine the patterns of users who

comment on stories the seed sites.

• How do they interact with news organizations and each other?
• Use a web crawler to crawl the seed sites and

record all commenters to a database.

• Focus on only a few larger sites.
• No standard for user comments and accounts.
• Requires site specific crawling rules.

Commenters to News Organizations

• Commenter graph will be generated from the

database.

• Forms a bipartite graph.
• Each site will be its own graph.
• Nodes are commenters and news stories.
• Edges are a user commenting on a story.
• Might require some manual human coding to remove spam & bots.