San Francisco Bay Area
News Ecology
Hayreddin Ceker
Outline
• Project Description
• Methodology
• Macro dimension
• Meso dimension
• Micro dimension
• Problems
• Conclusion
Project Description
Traditional Media
• communication and the expression
- TV, Radio
- Print publications
- Central source
- Informative
Networked Media
• Democratic and decentralized
• The audience can contribute
• Community to participation
and consumption
Project Description
Use “Complex Networks” analysis to demonstrate
transition from Traditional Media to Networked Media
 Take snapshots of current ecosystem, San Francisco Bay Area
Macro dimension: News-to-news network
Meso dimension: Author-to-link network
Micro dimension: Commenter network
Methodology
Macro dimension: News-to-news network
http://www.local123gallery.com/
http://mimiplumb.com/
http://www.susanfelterart.com/Welcome.html
http://www.berkeleyside.com
Macro dimension
http://laurendo.wordpress.com/
Different
subdomain
www.socketsite.com
www.cnn.com/page1.html
www.cnn.com/page2.html
www.berkeleyside.com
Same
website
News-to-news Graph
www.socketsite.com
http://laurendo.wordpress.com/
www.cnn.com
www.berkeleyside.com
News-to-news NW
•
•
•
•
Inbound link #
Outbound link #
Central nodes
Corner nodes
Degree of leakage
• Whether the Bay Area is still pointing mainly the websites
from the same area
• Or the Internet has changed the way the local websites
behave
• Categorizing Links
• Categorize news sites if they match the seed site list
• News sites out of the box
• Another implication of degree of leakage is to find out new
source-like websites that the news benefit from.
Methodology
Meso dimension: Author-to-news network
Author-to-link NW
• Bipartite graph
which author linked
websites more often
which web sites are
referred more frequently
Tracey Taylor
http://mimiplumb.com
Lauren
Callahan
http://www.fellinirestaurant.net
Richard Parks
Degree of author
Degree of websites
Methodology
• Micro dimension – Commenter Network
Are Blackberries best bet for Berkeley in
emergencies?
Berkeleyans move their money, and small
banks benefit
Commenter NW
• Bipartite Graph
• Links between commenters and news
Bruce
• 1-node graph
• How the commenters
interact with each other
Bruce
Blackberry…
2
Nora
Banks…
Nora
The Sharkey
1
The Sharkey
Problems in crawling
• No standard structure of websites
• Author
• Comment
• Commenters
• Old websites have huge amount of pages
• Hard to crawl
• Links to non-existing websites
• JavaScript
• Advertisements
• Media objects
Conclusion
• Is news media transitioning because of new technologies like
it has in the past?
• How is the Internet affecting news outlets, journalists, and
readers?
Hopefully, network theory and analysis can
help find these answers
El Fin
Thank you for listening!
¿QUESTIONS?