Ethan Zuckerman

International reporting in the age of participatory media

In the wake of Iran’s disputed 2009 presidential election, millions of protesters took to the streets of Tehran, some attempting to start a “green revolution” to oust President Ahmedinejad and other authority 1⁄2gures. The Iranian government attempted to quell the protests by arresting the instigators, and to render them invisible by tightly controlling media coverage of events. On June 16, a day after an estimated three million protesters marched on Azadi Street, Iran’s Ministry of Culture issued a partial ban targeting international reporters. Reporters could remain within Iran, but were banned from leaving their of1⁄2ces or hotel rooms and were explicitly prohibited from covering the protests. With strong audience interest in stories from Iran, news organizations faced a challenge: how do you report a story you have been banned from covering? Protesters in Iran and their supporters abroad quickly proffered one answer: cover Iran via citizen media. cnn relied heavily on its iReport site, which invites amateurs to submit videos of breaking news; the network aired 180 of the roughly 5,200 Iran-related videos they received.1 Robert Mackey of The New York Times focused the Times news blog, The Lede, on the protests, excerpting at length from Iran-focused blogs. Newsweek offered a “Twitter Timeline,” with key events in the protests illustrated by 140-character posts (“tweets”). The embrace of citizen media in the Iran coverage by professional journalism organizations represents a small, but dramatic, shift in the structure of international news, a quiet revolution transforming how we understand events in other countries. But as the Tehran street protests were a result not just of a disputed election but of deeper factors, professional journalism’s embrace of the amateur reflects a series of shifts beyond a press ban in Iran.

Global Attention Profiles - A Working Paper: First Steps Towards a Quantitative Approach to the Study of Media Attention

News media outlets (newspapers, radio and television broadcasts and websites) have finite capacities. Newspapers have practical limits to the number of articles that can be printed each day. Radio and television broadcasters can fit only so many stories into a 30 minute newscast, and news websites must select which stories fit on their homepages. The genesis of this paper was the anecdotal observation that major English-language news media outlets devote more attention to some countries than to others. This is to be expected: in a given week, some countries will experience newsworthy events like wars, natural disasters, scientific discoveries, economic collapses, sports championships, while others will not. But it is equally clear, on an anecdotal basis, that some countries get far more attention on a consistent basis, without regard to the relative frequency or magnitude of newsworthy events. How do newspapers, newscasts and website divide their attention between regions of the world? To which countries do they devote the most attention? Why do some countries get more attention than others? Do factors like a countrys population and the size of its economy predict which countries will command the most attention from media channels? This paper begins to answer some of these questions with repeatable, transparent statistical tools. It introduces the Global Attention Profile (GAP) as a portrait of a news media outlets attention to various nations. GAP software automatically crawls a news media outlets website and calculates country-by-country story counts over a period of time. This paper reports these story counts and correlates them to a wide range of country data sets provided by the World Bank. GAP research demonstrates that the most accurate predictor of a media outlets attention is the size of a nations gross domestic product. This correlation is significantly greater than the correlation between media attention and the size of a nations population, and appears to be the strongest correlation between media attention and 21 factors examined. Generally speaking, violent conflict seems to have less effect on media attention than the size of a nations economy does. While most media sources studied demonstrate similar patterns, one media outlet - the BBC News - shows radically different patterns. The BBCs media attention is more closely correlated to the size of a nations population than to the size of its economy.