Blog: Managing News

Talking with Bloggers, Campaigners, and Progressives about Tracking New and Traditional Media

A lot of campaigners in Washington, DC for Rootscamp just got a peak at Managing News - our news tracker and analyzer tool. If you missed the session, you can check out some videos of the tool here and contact us for a seven day free trial.

The session led into a great discussion on what people in the political realm need with a tool like this - particularly extreme media analyzers and bloggers. That there's a need to track online chatter on both a macro and a micro level wasn't in question - the people in the room knew that was necessary and it's been a recurring theme in all the sessions I've been to so far today. This in itself is really great to hear because we built Managing News to do just that, and to give a snapshot view of what’s happening online around a topic and make it easy for people to take action on it.

There was some good excitement about Managing News' ability to roll a lot of what people are already doing with Bloglines, Google alerts, and manual news reading into one shared platform, and that one that automatically adds information like keywords and locations to the news it sucks in. We also heard some great feature requests - like source exclusion, clipping reports printed in various formats, and close captioning tracking - that will be keeping us busy for awhile : ) Let us know if you have a specific news tracking or analyzing need. We're happy to talk about what Managing News and other tools can do to help.

Help Us Work on This New Tool

Managing News is a Drupal powered news tracker and analyzer that helps communications teams and PR firms monitor news and trends across the internet. We're looking for a few smart, creative engineers to join our tight knit team to work on this new tool. If you're interested in Drupal, the news, aggregation, and working on a totally different type of tool, check out the job description. Drop us a line if you want to learn more: jobs@managingnews.com.

A Glimpse at how Geocoding Helps Identify Stories in Managing News

I first noticed the trend at 4:00 pm yesterday afternoon when I was testing Managing News - it looked like something was going on in the Caribbean. I jumped over to CNN to see what was happening and saw that a major earthquake hit the Caribbean yesterday two hours before.

This morning I went back to Managing News to check out the earthquake coverage and checked out the geocoded map that Jeff talked about yesterday. The Caribbean earthquake news really jumps out.

Putting News Stories on the Map

We’ve long wanted our team aggregator and media analyzer Managing News to automatically geotag the news that it tracks. But getting this to happen presented some interesting questions and challenges. What does it mean to put a news story on map? Should it show where the news is coming from or what part of the world is being talked about?

We decided that in the case of Managing News and the people using it to monitor the news, it’s more important to map what the news is about. We want to be able to show a map that people can look at and immediately know what is being talked about – like in this map, showing news tracked about several key financial institutions activities.

But this raised more questions. How can you geocode the content of a news item, and could we do this meaningfully? And most importantly, how do we identify locations in a stream of text?