Linking event archives to news: a computational method for analyzing the gatekeeping process

Welbers, Kasper; Atteveldt, Wouter van; Bajjalieh, Joe; Shalmon, Dan; Joshi, Pradnyesh Vineet; Althaus, Scott; Chan, Chung-Hong; Wessler, Hartmut und Jungblut, Marc (2021): Linking event archives to news: a computational method for analyzing the gatekeeping process. In: Communication Methods and Measures, Vol. 16, No. 1: pp. 59-78

Abstract

Digital archives that document real-world events provide new opportunities for large-scale analyses of how news coverage represents reality. We present a method and open-source tool for linking event data to news articles, and demonstrate its application with an analysis of event and country level predictors of terrorism coverage in The Guardian from 2006 to 2018, using event data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). Our method builds on established techniques for calculating document similarity, and we propose a novel strategy for fine-tuning parameters of the event matching algorithm that requires no manual coding. An online appendix is provided that documents all code to replicate our analysis and reuse our tools.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Social Sciences > Department of Communications and Media (IfKW)
• Subjects: 000 Computer science, information and general works > 070 News media, journalism and publishing
• ISSN: 1931-2458
• Language: English