from Amazon
Monday, August 29, 2011
Was Irene overcovered?
Nate tackles it, but I’m going to give him a single, maybe a double on this. He did one thing wrong, and one thing unnecessarily.
Wrong: he did a great job by covering how the traditional media covered it:
The Web site NewsLibrary.com is a searchable database of millions of news accounts — mostly newspaper and magazine articles, but also some sources like television transcripts. While it lacks representation of things like blogs and social media, it contains a highly comprehensive sample of what we might think of as the traditional media.
The real issue was the real-time coverage. And in this day and age, this is what the issue is about. While I expect The Weather Channel to cover it 100% of the time (it is it’s raison d’etre), should we expect it from all the networks? How proportionate of their coverage should it get? Nate did not tackle the TV coverage, and instead relied on what the above site gave, which, presumably from the description, was most about non-TV coverage. I’ll give him props for tackling it, but he didn’t stick to the debate topic.
#2: why Nate, did you do this:
This is defined by taking the total number of stories that mentioned the storm by name (for instance, “Hurricane Hugo” or “Tropical Storm Hugo”; either one is considered acceptable) and dividing by the average number of stories per day that were available in the NewsLibrary.com database during that period. I then multiply the result by 10 just to make things a little bit more legible — so essentially, a News Unit consists of one-tenth of all the stories published on a given day.
Why not multiply by 100 instead of 10, and then you can say “a News Unit is a percentage of all stories published”. Can’t you just say Irene was 22.5% of the news stories, rather than say 2.25 News Units?
I know it’s a nit, but the entire story centered around this metric. It would have been so much clearer to have said 22.5% of news stories.
The one thing that one must correct for that is very hard to isnwhat else was competing for media time. For example the situation in Libya may have had an effect.
Two other quick thoughts
1. Does then increasing internationalization of news coverage mean that hurricanes are more likely to get national exposure, especially where a major city is involved I.e., New York
2. I suspect Katrina has inflated the NU rating of post Katrina storms.
Nevertheless I enjoyed nate’s piece as always