Tracking the Economic Slowdown. The media’s coverage of the troubled economy has shifted repeatedly in the last year from a narrative about mortgages to one about recession, a banking crisis and now largely gas prices—a changing storyline and one that differs from medium to medium.
Moreover, the connection between media coverage and economic events has often been uneven. Sometimes, coverage has lagged months behind economic activity, when the storyline was dependent on government data. Other times, coverage has tracked events erratically, as with housing and inflation. But when the story is easier to tell, as in the case of gas prices, coverage has been closely tied to what is actually occurring in the marketplace.
These are some of the findings of a new detailed examination of how the American news media have covered the economic slowdown over the last two years, produced by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Among the study’s findings: Rethinking Social Relevancy Rank: What's Missing? The future of search almost certainly involves social networks, social graphs, or social filtering in some capacity.
Companies will live or die by whether they get the "social" part right: creating the right level of intimacy, trust, reliability, social connectedness, and accuracy in their results listings. Of course, this specifically means that their user experience must at least meet or, preferably, exceed that of Google's. To achieve this, we must first stop arguing over the different flavors of search. Real-time search. Social search. Because the promise of social network integration with search is a current favorite topic, we'll focus in this post on that: a class of social search. Alex proposes that we rank search results by a kind of Social Relevancy Rank, first displaying results from friends and people whom we follow and later displaying results from "taste neighbors" and influencers, etc.
First, as Alex points out, "trusted opinions are scarce. " Breaking News Link Journalism: Blagojevich Arrest. So you’ve got a big breaking story right in your backyard, e.g. the governor gets arrested for trying to sell the U.S.
Senate seat vacated by the President Elect. Your newsroom is on the case, but the story is still developing. There are national ramifications, so reporting goes beyond the local angle. How do you round out your front page coverage, add to your dynamic updates, and reinforce to readers that you are THE destination for this story? If you’re the Chicago Tribune, you create a link journalism feature that dynamically tracks what “what others are saying“. You create a continuously updating news aggregation page (using a Publish2 widget) and you get a team of producers and editors to collaborate on gathering links (using a Publish2 newsgroup). Then, as everyone reacts to the story, you promote reactions from “Other sites, other voices” alongside reader reactions. And what if you’re in a nearby city in a neighboring state?
Like I said in my last post, Gov. It’s easy. Who is making the most of the web covering the elections. Elections bring out the best in online journalism.
News organisations have plenty of time to plan, there’s a global audience up for grabs, and the material lends itself to interactive treatment (voter opinions; candidates’ stances on various issues; statistics and databases; constant updates; personalisation). Not only that, but the electorate is using the internet for election news more than any other medium apart from television (and here are some reasons why).
PaidContent has a good roundup of various UK editors’ views, and decides blogs, Twitter and data are the themes (more specifically, liveblogging and mapping). Choice picks include the Telegraph teaming up with the New York Times and RealClearPolitics.com; the Independent teaming up with LiveJournal.; and MSN teaming up with Populus for a “wisdom-of-crowds” predictor. Sky’s interactive map is quite fun too. Chrys Wu has an overview of where to follow the results live online: Distributed journalism, personalisation, and maps.