San Francisco Bay Area News Ecology

Hayreddin Ceker

Outline• Background• Project Description• Data collection• Related Work

Background

• communication and the expression-TV-Radio-Print publications

Traditional Media

• Democratic and decentralized• The audience can contribute• Community to participation

and consumption

Networked Media INTERNET

Supporting Idea

A key point is given by Adrienne Russell to support the idea of new networked media and its reliance in her book

Treatments of new media in Iraq War (2003)

Treatments of old media in Gulf War (1991)

It is referred overtly that George W. Bush was not able to repeat the father Bush’s trick of massaging the message, 12 years after Bush senior expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

Project Description

Use “Complex Networks” analysis to demonstrate transition from Traditional Media to Networked Media

Take snapshots of current ecosystem, San Francisco Bay AreaNews-to-news networkAuthor-to-link networkCommenter network

News-to-news NW• Inbound link #• Outbound link #• Central nodes• Corner nodes

Author-to-link NW• Bipartite graph

Author 1

Author 2

Author 3

San Francisco Chronicle

San Jose Mercury News

- Source for news- Author’s attitude

Old style vs Hyperlinks

Degree of author Degree of websites

Commenter NW

• Bipartite Graph• Links between commenters and news

Commenter 1

Commenter 2

Commenter 3

News A

News B

• 1-node graph• How the commenters interact with each other

Commenter 1

Commenter 2

Commenter 3

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Effective Factors• Measure density, centrality, betweenness etc. metrics

• Seek for “degree of leakage”• The links which are not in the ecology

• Influence of “agenda setting”• The power of media in affecting audiences in terms of

• what stories to consider newsworthy • how much prominence and space to give them

Predictions• News-to-news network• Groups of websites

• Source• Hubs• Blogs

• Big organizations have more inbound links and very few outbound links

• Blog news websites have outbound links• Comments are under effect of agenda setting• Degree of leakage toward Wikipedia like websites

I wonder whether• There are similar values of • Average number of inbound or outbound links for the websites in the same category• Average number of comments etc

• There are popular news, authors, commenters

Data Collection• Use a sample of 180 news websites from the San Francisco

Bay area• Crawl the websites

Link recognition

Author Recognition

Comment Recognition

Problems• No standard structure of websites• Author• Comment • Commenters

• Old websites have huge amount of pages• Hard to crawl• Links to non-existing websites

• Advertisements• Media objects

Related Work• Power-law distribution in co-authorship by Newman• The Internet is slowly closing in on television as Americans’

main source of national and international news

Cont’d• A Network Analysis of Chicago Websites• To simplify analysis, sites were coded by Category

El Fin

Thank you for listening!¿QUESTIONS?