After a series of travels that started in late March, I am glad to be back in Toronto and enjoying the comforts of familiarity. One of the most curious things I observed during my travels was the kind of news sources I used, and the kinds of stories that were covered. When I left for HK and China in early May, the oil well explosion in the Gulf of Mexico had already been happening for a few days, although my sources were mostly international news agencies and not Canadian ones. By the time a week had past, I had seen nothing in the news coverage in Hong Kong (which is broadcasted on the trains and subways). Compared to the 24/7 coverage on BBC, and the regular tidbits I was getting through RSS feeds that monitor international news sources, I was even more surprised that some of the print sources in Toronto did not have substantial coverage of the story until about April 29th, about a week after the start of the explosion. Maybe that’s a reasonable time for the journalists to wait for all the facts to come out to start reporting, but not even a little mention?
The first question I had was pretty specific: was the coverage of the Exxon Valdez similar in its rate of spreading? First picked up by international news channels, and only slowly picked up in areas and locales that are not immediate affected by the spill? What were the channels or avenues available then that weren’t available now? Was my expectation that the developed world should have reported at least of the event within the first week of the explosion in some form simply a personal expectation that has no basis in the realities of media and journalism?
As I continued my travels into China, I realized that I was learning more about local politics (a May 16th election in Hong Kong) and local economies (heavy rainfall caused damage to ground floor stores and farm fields in Quangdong Province) that my friends and relatives have to deal with than I ever do in conversation with them. Hearing and seeing many of those things helped me put together a picture of the challenges and opportunities that exist in a country that is going through a period of rapid development, for not only the people that live there, but also for those that are trying to engage within it.
This prompted the latest question that emerged in my mind: what does the nature of news-localization look like? How do you operationalize news, event, locale, medium, time span, amongst many other relevant concepts, and come up with ways to qualify the speed and distance with which specific news items travel? I am really curious to know what that picture looks like. Acquiring the relevant data is not as simple as accessing existing datasets. In a way, you have to go back and see how media monitoring was done prior to innovative technologies that are now doing it automatically, and also how it is done in different languages. It also unavoidably requires collecting data that spans linguistic boundaries, and comparing different media practices not only at the national level, but also down to the regional and community levels.
In all honesty, just the exercise of trying to map out that world is in itself a feat, never mind actually executing it. It is definitely the work of many individuals and institutions with specialized skills and knowledge. Yet, the process of designing and developing what is essentially a research method or framework that allows for the actual research to be conducted is just as exciting as actually going out. The kind of mapping I am describing above is the blueprint for the work that researchers from different disciplines and backgrounds would utilize, despite their use of different research and design methodologies based on different media cultures and practices.
Certain projects like Managing News is already underway. Do you know of other media monitoring projects with a spatial or temporal spin? I know there are many more buried in the list-serv emails in my inbox which is in an atrocious state at the moment.
