NewsFrames Community Report | April 2018

newsframes media analysis

There are many different ways to participate in NewsFrames.

The News Frames community is growing! So, we want to start making regular updates to let everyone in the broader Global Voices community stay informed about what is going on and how you can participate.

What NewsFrames is Focusing on Right Now

Right now we're focused on streamlining the participation process and making sure there are as many ways to volunteer with NewsFrames as possible.

There are a number of different ways to be a part of NewsFrames — all you need to do is choose one of the projects that best suits your interests. For example, you can conduct media analysis on a topic and write a post about your findings or you can:

  • Curate or build a media collection for a country or a topic of interest
  • Translate published NewsFrames stories into other languages
  • Become a “community connector” that helps discuss framing with other members of the GV community

With this last idea for participation, what we're hoping is that there will be more conversations about framing. If this is something you like to do, then this is a great way for you to participate with NewsFrames.

For those who want to dive into News Frames, Andrea Chong Bras and Nevin Thompson put together an Exploration Checklist that will help you to get started with your first Media Cloud search and help you find patterns in the data.

How to Start Your Newsframes Exploration

If you're new to NewsFrames and media analysis, starting out with a NewsFrames Story Exploration is a great way to get your feet wet and discover some of the basic principles behind the creation of a NewsFrames post. Read more here.

Experiment With Different Story Types

We are also working on documenting how to write a News Frames story that is both data-driven and narratively compelling.

So far, we have the following short story types:

Contact one of us to get started!

News Frames Stories — Highlights

In this community update, we also would like to highlight some stories that we believe are good examples of what News Frames aims to accomplish, and also demonstrate the challenges we face when working on data-driven stories.

In Brexit and Bias? The Framing of Immigrants in the Media, Connie Moon Sehat used the Media Cloud tool to identify topics that were prominent in the media coverage surrounding the Brexit process over the last year. Terms in Brexit coverage were analyzed in context using the Topic Mapper feature.

Topic Mapper

Topic Mapper is a tool integrated into Media Cloud. This tool allows you to do in-depth research into a specific media topic by mapping connections among topics and sub-topics across time. Additionally, by using Topic Mapper we can answer how specific terms are linked in the coverage of a particular topic, as well as which stories have more social media traction.

New: Bias Prism

By using the newly launched Bias Prism tool, terms that appeared in Brexit coverage were flagged for perspectival or biased language which allowed us to better perceive the tone surrounding the framing of this issue in the media. By using a combination of these analytical tools, we can move closer to our goal of understanding how media frames news coverage.

The term “values” in context about immigrants in the Brexit Topic Mapper.

In the post How Indigenous Communities Are Using Data to ‘Reframe’ Their Narratives Through Digital Storytelling, Belen Febres-Cordero reports on the first series of the Reframed Stories project that we undertook in close collaboration with people of the Sarayaku and the Shuar nations from the Ecuadorian Amazon. The main objective of the Reframed Stories project is to work with indigenous communities that have been historically excluded or misrepresented in media and to help them see how they are being depicted in the news.

Searching for ‘indios’ in Ecuador and Venezuela: A Lesson in Language and Data by Iria Puyosa recounts what happens when the data is not strong enough to support the story we want to explore. This “failure story” acknowledges that working on data-driven storytelling is not always straightforward. The major takeaway is that data journalists must be willing to shelve stories when the data is not solid enough to support their hypotheses.

The last NewsFrames story we want to highlight is not so recent. How Sex Is Framed When Reporting On Japan by Nevin Thompson was published in September 2017. Until today, this story is the top read News Frames post. We invite you to read it and tell us why you think it has been so popular.

Acknowledging Lingua's Contribution to NewsFrames

Beyond our experimental site, News Frames stories have also been published on different Lingua sites. The NewsFrames team wants to acknowledge this huge contribution from the Lingua translators who are helping to amplify our work. There are more than 100 translations of News Frames stories into Spanish (31), Russian (20), French (17), Malagasy (14), Arabic (7), Chinese (5), Deutsch (5), Greek (3), Portuguese (2), Italian (2), Romanian (1), Bengali (1), and Magyar (1).

Our most translated story continues to be Fake, Fraud, False, Fabricated: Finding the Vocabulary for Truth in News that was translated into French, Russian, Spanish, Deutsch, Malagasy, Romanian, Arabic, and Bengali.

Stories are Waiting to Be Translated!

If you are looking for stories to translate, these stories are waiting for you:

Building Media Lists… We Still Need Your Help!

Andrea Chong Bras just took on responsibility for organizing the News Frames Collections for Media Cloud. Currently, we have the following News Frames Collections: Ecuador NewsFrames, NewsFrames Venezuela, Pakistan NewsFrames and NewsFrames Myanmar.

And we are actively working to curate media lists for Japan, Canada, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya, Madagascar, and Trinidad & Tobago. If you want to volunteer to help News Frames collections, let us know. We are particularly interested in curating media lists for Mexico and Colombia, countries that will hold presidential elections this year.

Big projects, Big News Coming Soon

We just launched our most anticipated analytical tool Bias Prism that is integrated into the NewsFrames platform. Our next development is set to be the Meme Mapper. Meme mapper will be help us to track how memes spread on the internet. This tool will facilitate the process of identifying when and where an image is published originally and how it turns into a meme. Stay tuned. We hope to have great news related to Meme Mapper within the next few months.

Belen Febres-Cordero will be delivering a lightning talk on the Reframed project at RightsCon Toronto 2018 In May. And we are already working on another Rising Frames project involving News Frames, Rising Voices and Canadian First Nations organizations.

Got a question?

If you have any questions at all, just contact Nevin, Connie, Iria, Belen or Andrea, who lead the NewsFrames project.

You can reach us by email or on Slack.

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