Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Fox Business news - only soft headlines

A look at a common news aggregator, newsflashr.com, reveals a small yet curious detail about how today's news are presented by major publishers. By simply looking at the headlines it becomes obvious that Fox Business news, the new business channel of media mogul Murdoch, skips the important issues of the day. This is of course a rough estimate since I am unable to determine whether this is a coincidence or simply an issue with the aggregator. The following is an excerpt of the faq section from the website and basically states that news are aggregated from the latest news feeds. They should therefore be a representation of news from the respective news service.

- newsflashr auto-generates every 15 minutes resulting in a new display of the most popular keywords (topics) in the headlines. These topics are extracted from all the latest news feeds. Each category results in a different 'cloud' of top topics.

click to enlarge



source: newsflashr, a faster way to track headline news
http://www.newsflashr.com/feeds/business.html

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your right about Fox, but wrong about Newsflashr.

The 'topics' in the faq refers to their topics view - click on the button at top right to see the alternate view ... cool

For the snapshot you display, the headlines are simply sorted by time so it looks like you're on to something - hard evidence in the case against Fox news!!

Anonymous said...

jk:
Thank you for pointing this out. To my defense I would never call this 'hard evidence'. I was merely making an observation, albeit one that I happen to believe in.