This document summarizes Pablo Rey Mazón's work analyzing newspaper front pages using quantitative and visual methods. It describes how he began coding front pages in 2011 and developed PageOneX, an open source online tool for scraping, coding, and displaying newspaper data. PageOneX allows comparative analysis of news coverage across papers and countries over time for events like the Arab Spring, Japanese tsunami, and Occupy movement. The document provides examples analyzing Spanish and US paper coverage and how news evolves asynchronously. It promotes adding other media sources like transcripts, online papers, and tweets to capture information flows between social and mass media.

1. PageOneX
Analyzing Newspaper Front Pages
pageonex.com
Pablo Rey Mazón
th
Oct. 16 2012 prey@mit.edu
Movement/Media Research and numeroteca.org
Action Project’s (MRAP). Boston College @numeroteca

2. How I started coding front pages?
How I started coding front pages?

4. May 15th, 2011 Madrid

5. May 16th, 2011

6. May 16th, 2011

7. May 17th, 2011

8. May 17th, 2011

9. May 18th, 2011

10. May 18th, 2011

11. May 19th, 2011

12. May 19th, 2011

13. May 23th, 2011

14. Analyzing front pages is a Shortcut

15. Newspapers + Twitter

16. Visual approach to quantitative analysis
vs
Visual Quantitative analysis

17. Newspapers + Twitter + % percentage of surface

18. Adding cualitative analysis

21. Information flows rapidly back and forth
between SNS and mass media.

22. Occupy movement
Newspapers coverage
Twitter

24. Show me the raw data!

25. News evolution in time
Haiti earthquake. January, 2010

26. Japanese Tsunami. January, 2010

27. % 125cm²
Using percentage to compare

28. Number of articles in the front page of main Spanish and
US newspapers
Spain
El País 7.5
El Mundo 7.5
ABC 4.5
La Vanguardia 5.1
La Razón 4.9
Público 4.6
Average 5.7
USA
WSJ 34.8 (28.0 short-small headlines)
The Washington post 13.1
The New York times 15.5
The Boston Globe 17.7 (9.2 short-small headlines)
USA Today 13.0
Los Ángeles Times 9.7
Average 17.3 (11.1)
Period of 21 days, May 15th - June 4th 2011.

29. Two countries
Coverage
comparison
halfway there…
Spanish US Newspapers. Japanese Tsunami 2011

30. Two countries
Coverage
comparison
halfway there…
Spanish US Newspapers. Japanese Tsunami 2011

31. News collision
War in Lybia vs Tsunami
11

32. 1
1
One at a time

33. Arab Spring Coverage
Egypt Lybia
Compare simultaneous news evolution in time

35. 15M Movement– Dominique Strauss-Kahn arrest.
Spanish newspapers. May, 2011

36. Compare asynchronous news evolution in time
2 week rule?
Haiti Earthquake – Japanese Tsunami.

37. PageOneX.com
Online / Open Source / Distributed analysis
Scraping
Coding
Displaying
Code available at
http://github.com/numeroteca/PageOneX-ruby
Test alpha version and more info
http://pageonex.com

38. Scraping

39. Coding

40. Display

41. Number of related news / day

42. Trayvon Martin case.
Tweets + Front pages + Signatures change.org

43. Add other media pieces
Transcripts
Online
Newspapers
Tweets

45. http://bit.ly/analyzemediatools

46. pageonex.com
Pablo Rey Mazón
prey@mit.edu
See examples at
http://numeroteca.org/cat/frontpage-newspaper/
Twitter
@numeroteca