good.is — A look back at this year?s biggest news stories, from the serious (financial collapse) to the bizarre (balloon boy), paints an interesting picture of what events held our attention in this last year of the decade. The website Journalism.org monitors the news from 55 outlets every week, calculating what percent of the week?s print, television...
Dec 23, 2009 View in Crawl 4
angelxDec 23, 2009
Honestly, at first glance, this was actually kind of a pleasant surprise. MOST of the huge items that jump out at you right away are legitimate news-worthy issues.Then you zoom in and see Balloon Boy and the white house party crashers. But I guess we really can't blame the media any more than our general population--they publish what sells. What is it with our society and our constant desire for pointless drivel?Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go digg up some lazy kitten videos and watch Jersey Shore.
rednipDec 23, 2009
I've seen many Mythbusters shows, but not that one. Also, while it's mentioned in the summary, I can't find 'balloon boy' on the graphic. There is a lot missing, but then again, I'm a news junkie.Still it's not bad, nice effort.
dankbuddzDec 23, 2009
Shut up.
Closed AccountDec 23, 2009
But it doesn't rotate.
Closed AccountDec 24, 2009
this claims that there's been just as much news about tiger woods' adultery as there's been about the mammogram policy change?? gimme a break, buried for absurd inaccuracy
mishabearDec 26, 2009
I wish she had a smaller, tighter box too, if you know what I am saying.
mishabearDec 26, 2009
And why isn't the economy considered bad news?
langengroDec 27, 2009
I suppose there must be some methodological error in the making of this graphic. The fact that Global Warming and Copenhagen are not even mentioned is just too bizarre.Probably some journalists were (1) Brainstorming for topics(2) Making an online frequency search for these topics in their sample of 55 news outlets. With this method, if you fail on step (1), you'll obviously get distorted results. Also, a topic like "Bernie Madoff" is more easily searchable than "climate" and "warming", since you don't get unwelcome results in the data like the weather forecast etc. Of course, it's also completely arbitrary whether "Iran" is one single topic, or whether both "Iran elections" and "Iran powerplants" are. Or then maybe "Iran" is really just a sub-topic of "Middle East"?Due to these difficulties, it's not surprising that the makers of this graphic obviously preferred to search for well-individualized tags (like Tiger Woods) instead of wishy-washy ones (like Climate Change).