Fuego FAQ

What is Fuego?

Fuego is a tool that monitors the portion of the Twitterverse that talks about the future of journalism and sees what they’re talking about. Every hour, it pulls in the links they’re discussing, analyzes them for popularity and freshness, does a little math, and determines which are at the center of the conversation.

Each tile on Fuego represents a story people are talking about. They’re arranged in rank order, starting with the most discussed story of the moment. Each one contains the story’s headline, its source, and a sample tweet that links to that story, to provide context about why it’s being talked about.

What are the ways to use Fuego?

There are three views for Fuego; you can swap between them at the top of the Fuego page. They vary based on how far back into its archives you want Fuego to look for links.

The default Fuego view looks at new links from the past 24 hours. More recent links are given more weight than older ones. It’s the best way to get a quick glance at the day’s conversation.

The “fresh” view of Fuego looks at only new links from the past four hours. If you’re checking Fuego multiple times a day, you’ll probably want to use this view — although because the time span is shorter and Fuego has less data to work with, the links may be less focused on journalism issues at times.

Finally, if you want to take the long view, check out Fuego’s week view, which summarizes the most popular links of the past seven days. It’s a great way to catch up if you’ve been away from the future-of-news world for a few days.

How can I access Fuego?

You can always check out Fuego on its main page. The top 10 links also appear on our front page, where you’ll also find all our most recent articles about the future of journalism

In addition, if you follow Fuego’s Twitter account, @niemanlabfuego, you’ll see a tweet from us whenever a new link breaks into the upper eschelon of Fuego’s ranks. It’s a great way to make sure you don’t miss any of the big stories your colleagues in the space are talking about each day.

Finally, you can also subscribe to our Fuego RSS feed, featuring the same buzzed-about links as our Twitter feed.

Who did this?

Fuego is a project of the Nieman Journalism Lab, part of Harvard University. We’re passionate about journalism and do reporting and research to try to help it evolve in an Internet age.

Fuego is a work in progress; we’ll be tweaking the algorithm to make it better over time. We’d love your suggestions: Email Lab director Joshua Benton (design) or staff writer Andrew Phelps (code).