Track the Media’s Attention Span over Time
Visualize media trends by counting the total number of Yahoo! News mentions of a specific phrase over a series of dates.
The nature of news is that it reports about what’s new in the world each day. But in the rush to bring the latest news to the public, news organizations often have a pack mentality. The news being covered by the top media outlets this week is different from what was covered last week. And sometimes, looking at what news organizations decide to cover can be more interesting than the news itself.
In that spirit, this hack is about tracking a topic’s ebbs and flows through the news cycle. Because Yahoo! News brings together over 7,000 different news sources from around the world into one site, it’s the perfect place to spot trends and track what the media is tracking. One drawback to tracking 7,000 news sources is that storage of that information becomes an issue. So Yahoo! News stores only the last 30 days’ worth of articles. But in our 24-hour-a-day news world, 30 days ago can seem like ancient history.
Tip
This hack was inspired by "Tracking Result Counts over Time” [Hack #63] from the first edition of Google Hacks. If you’d like to see how to implement a similar hack for Google Search results, track down a copy of the first edition of Google Hacks.
The key to being able to track a keyword in news articles over time is being able to isolate articles by day. Luckily, the Yahoo! News advanced search interface (http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/advanced ...
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