Media Cloud: Massive Open Source Collection of Global News on the Open Web

In this paper, we present a dataset of over 1.4M online news articles from 313 local U.S. news outlets published over 20 months (between April 4th, 2020 and December 31st, 2021). These outlets cover a geographically diverse set of communities across the United States. In order to estimate characteristics of the local audience, included with this news article data is a wide range of county-level metadata, including demographics, 2020 Presidential Election vote shares, and community resilience estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The NELA-Local dataset can be found at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/GFE66K.

Section: Related Datasetsmentioning

confidence: 99%

NELA-Local: A Dataset of U.S. Local News Articles for the Study of County-Level News Ecosystems

Horne

Gruppi

Joseph

et al. 2022

“…Second, Media Cloud is a platform that has provided news data from a wide range of national and international outlets since 2011 (Roberts et al 2021). Similar to the NELA datasets, Media Cloud collects news article data and publication metadata, but it does not provide the full text data.…”

Section: Related Datasets and Resourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

NELA-PS: A Dataset of Pink Slime News Articles for the Study of Local News Ecosystems

Horne,

Gruppi

2024

Pink slime news outlets automatically produce low-quality, often partisan content that is framed as authentic local news. Given that local news is trusted by Americans and is increasingly shutting down due to financial distress, pink slime news outlets have the potential to exploit local information voids. Yet, there are gaps in understanding of pink slime production practices and tactics, particularly over time. Hence, to support future research in this area, we built a dataset of over 7.9M articles from 1093 pink slime sources over 2.5 years. This dataset is publicly-available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YHWTFC.

“…To the best of our knowledge, our data is the largest existing, publicly available collection of local news content. The closest publicly available dataset to ours is from Media-Cloud (Roberts et al 2021). While our dataset shares outlets in common with MediaCloud, the local U.S. outlets covered by the latter are embedded almost exclusively in large population centers, while our dataset covers local media outlets from both large and small population areas.…”

Section: Local News Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Local News Online and COVID in the U.S.: Relationships among Coverage, Cases, Deaths, and Audience

Joseph

Horne

Green

et al. 2022

We present analyses from a real-time information monitoring system of online local news in the U.S. We study relationships among online local news coverage of COVID, cases and deaths in an area, and properties of local news outlets and their audiences. Our analysis relies on a unique dataset of the online content of over 300 local news outlets, encompassing over 750,000 articles over a period of 10 months spanning April 2020 to February 2021. We find that the rate of COVID coverage over time by local news outlets was primarily associated with death rates at the national level, but that this effect dissipated over the course of the pandemic as news about COVID was steadily displaced by sociopolitical events, like the 2020 U.S. elections. We also find that both the volume and content of COVID coverage differed depending on local politics, and outlet audience size, as well as evidence that more vulnerable populations received less pandemic-related news.