HLS Center Monitors Media

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School has launched a new Web site, Mediacloud.org, that will allow scholars and Internet users to monitor the flow of news and ideas online.

The service will provide data on how news stories spread around the Internet through both blogs and mainstream media outlets, and may help to answer important questions about the forces shaping popular discourse.

Aiming to give media scholars and watch-dogs more comprehensive data, the new tool automatically downloads text from blogs and newspapers and then categorizes the stories by content, sorting them into a searchable database.

The Web site will allow researchers to compare how different news organizations in the United States and abroad cover stories, offering new insight as to how blogs and online news outlets shape contemporary coverage.

The debate over the journalistic integrity and relevance of blogs has too often relied on “marshalling anecdotes” and has lacked quantitative evidence, said Ethan R. Zuckerman, a Berkman Fellow who was one of the developers of the site.

Defenders of blogs consider them vital agenda setters and reporters, citing instances where blogs have carried important stories neglected by mainstream media.

For example, in 2007 the political blog Talking Points Memo played an instrumental role in unveiling the Bush administration’s politically motivated firing of US attorneys.

But critics dismiss serious journalistic contributions by blogs as being unrepresentative of the blogosphere as a whole, and tend to characterize blogs as forums often tainted by ideological biases.

Media Cloud will allow researchers to test some of those hypotheses, Zuckerman said. Past efforts to study online news dissemination have focused on analyzing how Web sites link to one another.

“Who has the power to set the agenda? Where do ideas come from? It’s an empirical question with enormous implications for political theory and how we see the relationship between the net and democracy,” said Yochai Benkler, a Law School professor and one of the chief architects of the Web site.

Media Cloud plans to make much of its data available to the public and to release the code that runs the content database so that the Web site can serve as a research platform for scholars studying the subject matter, said Hal M. Roberts, the technical architect of the Web site and self-identified “geek in residence” at the Berkman Center.

Benkler, who is also the Center’s faculty co-director, said he plans to utilize the database to examine the public debate over the recent economic stimulus package and how online media sources helped shape the final package that emerged from Congress.

“It’s like looking through a new telescope and seeing things that your prior tools couldn’t show you,” said Benkler.

—Staff writer Elias J. Groll can be reached at egroll@fas.harvard.edu.