• Fellowships
  • Reports
  • Lab
  • Storyboard
    • Nieman Foundation at Harvard
    HOME
    About
    Subscribe
    Archives
              
    Foundation
    Reports
    Storyboard
    LATEST STORY
    BREAKING: The ways people hear about big news these days; “into a million pieces,” says source
    Business Models Mobile & Apps Audience & Social Aggregation & Discovery Reporting & Production
    ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
    Sept. 2, 2020, 2:15 p.m.
    Aggregation & Discovery
    The Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer lets you analyze who and what gets airtime
    LINK: tvnews.stanford.edu  ➚   |   Posted by: Hanaa' Tameez   |   September 2, 2020

    While the use of local TV for news is declining, cable news is growing: Audience and revenue for Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN are all up this year. So which stories, and people, are getting the most airtime? Thanks to the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, anyone can query “the amount of time people appear and the amount of time words are heard in cable TV news.”

    The tool uses “deep-learning-based image and audio analysis processing techniques” to pull from more than 270,000 hours of programming and commercial segments from Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, dating back to January 1, 2010 and updating daily. “Computer vision is used to detect faces, identify public figures, and estimate characteristics such as gender to examine news coverage patterns. To facilitate topic analysis the transcripts are time-aligned with video content, and compared across dates, times of day and programs,” Geraldine Moriba, a journalist and filmmaker and 2019 JSK journalism fellow, explained on Medium. People can use the tool answer questions like “How much coverage does Trump receive compared to Biden? How did this change when coronavirus and the George Floyd protests came into the picture?” (There’s more on the methodology, and some findings, here.)

    The tool helps “increase transparency around daily editorial choices,” Moriba noted. “How long are certain people on the screen? How often are certain words mentioned? What will you find when you compare these measurements across time, channel, and programs?”

    The tool was created by the Computer Graphics Lab at Stanford University in collaboration with the John S. Knight Fellowship Program, with support from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Intel, Google, Amazon, and the National Science Foundation. The video dataset is from the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive.

    Here are some of the queries people have run so far:

    Check out the Cable TV News Analyzer here.

    Show tags
     
    What’s the best way to follow how the news is changing?
    Our daily email, with all the freshest future-of-journalism news.
    Prefer a once-a-week email? »
    The latest from Nieman Lab
    BREAKING: The ways people hear about big news these days; “into a million pieces,” says source
    Joshua Benton
    In 1924, a magazine ran a contest: “Who is to pay for broadcasting and how?” A century later, we’re still asking the same question
    Julia Barton
    You’re more likely to believe fake news shared by someone you barely know than by your best friend
    Joshua Benton
    To find readers for longform investigations, Public Health Watch leans on partners and in-person work
    Sarah Scire
    Could social media support healthy online conversations? New_ Public is working on it
    Sophie Culpepper
    Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
    BREAKING: The ways people hear about big news these days; “into a million pieces,” says source
    The New York Times and the Washington Post compete with meme accounts for the chance to be first with a big headline.
    In 1924, a magazine ran a contest: “Who is to pay for broadcasting and how?” A century later, we’re still asking the same question
    Radio Broadcast received close to a thousand entries to its contest — but ultimately rejected them all.
    You’re more likely to believe fake news shared by someone you barely know than by your best friend
    “The strength of weak ties” applies to misinformation, too.
    Help advance the Nieman Foundation’s mission “to promote and elevate the standards of journalism” by making a donation.

    To promote and elevate the standards of journalism

    Covering thought leadership in journalism

    Pushing to the future of journalism

    Exploring the art and craft of story
    © 2024 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College  /  Some rights reserved
    Harvard Trademark Privacy Digital Accessibility
    Walter Lippmann House    One Francis Ave.    Cambridge, MA 02138    617 495 2237