The image above shows a partial snapshot of the Managing News dashboard, shortly after having established the first groups for tracking disasters news worldwide with an emphasis on the recent Cyclone Nargis that swept Myanmar and the Sichuan Earthquake in China. While the map represented the disproportionate nature of these events next to other relatively reoccurring disasters of smaller scale, the selected headlines by the system were predominantly dedicated to regional USA events of little media impact outside its borders.

On an interesting conversation with Ian about this discrepancy in displayed priorities, he explained that the system uses a simple algorithm to determine top stories. It looks at the stories with the most "overlap" of popular tags, and then filters them to show only stories from sources with an Alexa rank > X. The map and the tag cloud though are simple displays of volume in the last 24 hours.

Could there be some political/media implications in this divergence? Why such a prominence of US based stories in the Managing News "My reader"? We thought that either their authors could be using a higher volume of popular words (probably "referencing" the Chinese and Myanmar disasters since those are the popular tags), or (probably less likely) the news about China and Myanmar is coming from sites below the Alexa rank threshold. In the the first option, as the more likely one, could reporters be explicitly dropping keywords into their text to optimize the relevancy of their stories? Or does this confirm how the predominance of US media generates information interference whether intentional or not?

In that regard, perhaps reporters talking about the American storms are a little more plugged in globally in how they communicate, and are referencing other stories more often, so that they are accidentally improving their rankings. Be as it may, the issue points at ways in which news could be if not directly tampered with, certainly influenced, and stresses the importance of a broader and more diverse global news network. This also points to a recurring topic: how the impact and prominence of disasters is related to cultural and social factors, not necessarily to exclusively figures to determine severity. Location, and perception weight almost just as much, and US storms for dominant American news outlets with strong local emphasis probably matter that much more that international events.

Another likely critical factor is to what extent this reflects not only a US predominance but an "English" one. By utilizing English as the primary language driver, news get narrowed around the cultural paradigm that those in command of that language may have established. Thus analysis of other channels will require not only different language tracking skills but probably a localized dedication. I'll try to test in the following weeks groups in Managing News to track disaster news utilizing Spanish sources, and keywords, and also a test case on how to try to track a limited region/city to discern how much can be filtered that might be relevant.