Throughout 2017, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking, researching, writing, and talking about how disinformation flows online, about filter bubbles and fact-checking, transparency for news organizations, and other important pieces of the puzzle about how the internet has changed the way so many of us consume and understand information.
But there’s been far too little attention paid to an older form of communication that still has deep influence in our democracy: that old-fashioned thing known as the television, specifically, TV news.
Why? Not because TV news networks, including Fox, MSNBC, and CNN, don’t have influence, but rather because television is difficult to study. Informed voices have urged Facebook to release its data to fact-checkers and others working to improve the quality of news shared online. But TV news content remains both opaque and ephemeral. TV news networks make their content available online generally, but viewers are at their mercy when searching for particular clips, sharing such information elsewhere, or providing structured datasets to help inform research. If a network goes defunct, like Al Jazeera America did, we don’t have any guarantee that material will be preserved.
Enter the Internet Archive, whose mission is to provide universal access to all knowledge. Most journalists know us for the Wayback Machine, which has preserved more than 308 billion webpages online. But the Internet Archive is also home to the TV News Archive, whose collection includes more than 1.4 million TV news shows, searchable by closed captions. We are working hard with partner organizations, with journalists, and with researchers, from Duke Reporters Lab to PolitiFact, from Stanford University to startups like Matroid and Joostware, to turn our archives into data. We are applying machine learning to generate structured data in increasingly sophisticated ways, so that ultimately it will be possible not just to search captions for TV news, but also faces, talking points, identify who is speaking, and more.
For example, in 2016 we launched the Political TV Ad Archive, which used an open source audio fingerprinting tool we called the Duplitron to track political ad airings across key media markets. We fed this information to our fact-checking and journalism partners, who mined it to report on the 2016 elections.
In 2017, we developed the Trump, congressional, and executive branch archives, curated collections of clips by key political and administration figures that can searched by keywords and phrases. We also created Face-o-Matic, which tracks the faces as shown on cable TV news of President Donald Trump and the four top congressional leaders, and Third Eye, which extracts chyrons, or the lower thirds of TV screens, and turns them into downloadable data ready for analysis. The New York Times editorial page, for example, used Third Eye to track how cable news networks differed in their coverage of key indictments in the Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.
In 2018, we plan to take even greater strides in helping us understand ourselves through TV news. “Who Said What,” by Joostware and “Contextubot,” by Bad Idea Factory, two of the winners of the Knight Foundation’s (in partnership with the Democracy Fund and the Rita Allen Foundation) call for projects to combat misinformation, rely on the TV News Archive to fuel their projects. We’re working with the Duke Reporters Lab on its Tech & Check project to help automate the workflow for fact-checkers. And we’re developing new partnerships with institutions like Stanford University to develop new ways to turn our TV News Archive into data.
We’re talking to media literacy educators about deploying TV News Archive materials into curricula. And in this age of media manipulation, we are exploring ways that we can authenticate TV news clips, so the viewer knows they have not been altered. Finally, we’re expanding our collection of TV beyond national borders, because understanding how others in the world view us, as well as how we view them, will be crucial in the years to come.
Even in 2018, in the era of tablets and phones and Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, TV still affects us all. Knowing our TV is crucial to understanding ourselves.
Nancy Watzman is managing editor of the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive.
Sydette Harry Listen to your corner and watch for the hook
Joanne McNeil Gatekeeping the gatekeepers
Francesco Marconi The year of machine-to-machine journalism
Matt DeRienzo A recession, then a collapse
S. Mitra Kalita The arc of news and audience
Renée Kaplan The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)
Alastair Coote The year of self-improvement
Taylor Lorenz Social and media will split
Edward Roussel Eyes, ears, and brains
Trushar Barot The Jio-fication of India
Kathleen McElroy Building a news video experience native to mobile
Feli Sánchez The year for guerrilla user research
Juleyka Lantigua Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time
Jennifer Coogan The future is female
Monique Judge Letting black women tell their own stories
Nikki Usher The year of The Washington Post
Frédéric Filloux External forces
Miguel Castro The arrival of the impact producer
Gordon Crovitz Serving readers over advertisers
Pia Frey Address users as individuals
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Seeking trust in fragmented spaces
Alfred Hermida Going beyond mobile-first
Millie Tran and Stine Bauer Dahlberg (Hint: It’s about your brand)
Richard Tofel The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Publishing less to give readers more
Jarrod Dicker Honesty in advertising
Eric Nuzum Beyond the narrative arc
Yvonne Leow The rise of video messaging
José Zamora Revenue-first journalism
AX Mina Memes and visuals come to the fore
Molly de Aguiar Good journalism won’t be enough
Jamie Mottram From pageviews to t-shirts
Hossein Derakhshan Television has won
David Skok Finding an information-life balance
Julia B. Chan Looking for loyalty in all the right places
Elizabeth Jensen Show your work
Emma Carew Grovum Newsroom culture becomes a priority
Dheerja Kaur Fun with subscription products
Steve Grove The midterms are an opportunity
Julia Beizer A longer view on the pivot
Carlos Martínez de la Serna The new journalism commons
Jennifer Choi Standing up for us and for each other
Charo Henríquez Training is an investment, not an expense
Umbreen Bhatti The trust problem isn’t new
Monika Bauerlein The firehose of falsehood
Cristina Wilson The year of the Instagram Story
Susie Banikarim R.I.P. Pivot to Video (2017–2017)
Ray Soto VR reaches the next level
Ruth Palmer Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities
Marie Gilot No assholes allowed
Vivian Schiller Pivot to tomorrow
Jessica Parker Gilbert Design connects storytelling and strategy
Jacqui Cheng Retailers move into content
Lucas Graves From algorithms to institutions
Vanessa K. DeLuca Women’s voices take center stage
Jared Newman Venture funding and digital news don’t mix
Sam Ford The year of investing in processes
Brian Lam Sketchy ethics around product reviews
Pablo Boczkowski The rise of skeptical reading
Rick Berke Value is the watchword
Niketa Patel Live journalism comes of age
Rubina Madan Fillion Unlocking the potential of AI
Matt Thompson Here come the attention managers
Errin Haines At the ballot, it’s time to count black women
Claire Wardle Disinformation gets worse
Mary Meehan Real lives are at stake in rural areas
Andrew Losowsky The year of resilience
Rodney Gibbs Tech workers turn to journalism
Felix Salmon Covering bitcoin while owning bitcoin
Raju Narisetti Mirror, mirror on the wall
C.W. Anderson The social media apocalypse
Tracie Powell The muting of underserved voices
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer Skepticism and narcissism
Manoush Zomorodi Self-help as a publishing strategy
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen The Snapchat scenario and the risk of more closed platforms
Kawandeep Virdee Zines had it right all along
Tanya Cordrey Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention
Andrew Ramsammy The year ownership mattered
Mary Walter-Brown Show a little vulnerability
Tanzina Vega It’s time for media companies to #PassTheMic
Alan Soon The rise of start of psychographic, micro-targeted media
Jim Moroney Newspapers have to be good enough for readers to pay for
Cory Haik Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact
Aron Pilhofer We can’t leave the business to the business side any more
Hannah Cassius The year of the echo-chamber escapists
Sally Lehrman Trust comes first
Sara M. Watson Feeds will open up to new user-determined filters
Federica Cherubini The rise of bridge roles in news organizations
Matt Boggie The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea
Marcela Donini and Thiago Herdy Collaboration is the way forward for Brazilian journalism
Kim Fox Audience teams diversify their approach
Raney Aronson-Rath Transparency is the antidote to fake news
Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán The editorial meeting of the future
Nushin Rashidian Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives
Zizi Papacharissi Women come back
Luke O'Neil The end is already here
Imaeyen Ibanga Longform video leads the way
Tamar Charney We get serious about algorithms
Dannagal G. Young Stop covering politics as a game
Mariano Blejman News games rule
Amy King Let’s amplify visual voice
Joanne Lipman Journalists inventing revenue streams
Michelle Garcia Navigating journalistic transparency
Eric Ulken The year local publishers get smart(er) about change
Doris Truong Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes
Amy Webb Listen to weak signals
Adam Thomas Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor
Evie Nagy Pivot to mobile video frustration
Helen Havlak Keywords, not publishers, power the world’s biggest feeds
Christopher Meighan Passive partnership is in the rearview
Mi-Ai Parrish Blockchain and trust
Daniel Trielli The rich get richer, the poor scramble
Emily Goligoski Looking beyond news for inspiration
Mike Caulfield Refactoring media literacy for the networked age
Juliette De Maeyer A responsible press criticism
Joyce Barnathan It will be harder to bury the news
Carrie Brown-Smith Transparency finally takes off
Jim Brady With the people, not just of the people
Sam Sanders Shine the light on ourselves
Tim Carmody Watch out for Spotify
Sarah Marshall Loyalty as the key performance indicator
Kristen Muller The year of the voter
Will Sommer The year local media gets conservative
Kinsey Wilson Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up
Heather Bryant Building the ecosystems for collaboration
Ståle Grut Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks
Caitlin Thompson Podcasting models mature and diversify
Rachel Schallom Better design helps differentiate opinion and news
Mira Lowe The year of the local watchdog
Andrew Haeg The year journalists become relationship builders
Michelle Ferrier The year of the great reckoning
Alexios Mantzarlis Moving fake news research out of the lab
Mario García Storytelling finally adapts to mobile
Cindy Royal Your journalism curriculum is obsolete
Justin Kosslyn The year journalists become digital security experts
Jesse Holcomb Information disorder, coming to a congressional district near you
Mandy Velez texting is lit rn, fam
Bill Keller A growing turn to philanthropy
P. Kim Bui The reckoning is only beginning
Corey Ford The empire strikes back
Nicholas Diakopoulos Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity
Michael Kuntz The only pivot that might work
Dan Shanoff You down with OTT? (Yeah, DTC)
Rodney Benson Better, less read, and less trusted
Caitria O'Neill The new court of public opinion
Laura E. Davis Writing answers before you know the question
Alice Antheaume Are you fluent in AI?
Basile Simon We need better career paths for news nerds
Kyle Ellis Let’s build our way out of this
Damon Krukowski Reviving the alt-weekly soul
Amie Ferris-Rotman More female reporters abroad (please)
Lanre Akinola Making noise is not a strategy
Pete Brown Push alerts, personalized
Lam Thuy Vo Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest
Matt Carlson Attacks on the press will get worse
Rachel Davis Mersey AI, with real smarts
Mariana Moura Santos Think local, act global
Borja Echevarría TV goes digital, digital goes TV
Craig Newmark Working together toward sustainable solutions