Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The results read like a revelation. The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties. And you’ve got company: If you’re a typical reader of Politico, chances are you’re a citizen of bubbleville, too.

The “media bubble” trope might feel overused by critics of journalism who want to sneer at reporters who live in Brooklyn or California and don’t get the “real America” of southern Ohio or rural Kansas. But these numbers suggest it’s no exaggeration: Not only is the bubble real, but it’s more extreme than you might realize. And it’s driven by deep industry trends....

It’s hard to extract meaning from raw data only, so we enrich our data by adding story metadata such as authorship, publication sources, entities, topic classification; social data including influencers on a story’s distribution, audience size, social velocity, and performance against peer stories. With this information, you can unpack each story and see how it is spreading. You can quickly spot events of significance in any topic, and analyze by format to find what works.

Meanwhile, our algorithms can already predict the eventual reach of newly published stories, and extract trending entities (recently, this power was used to pounce on and debunk “disinformation” spreading in the run up to the French Presidential election). Our metrics can be used to spot “white space” opportunities with an audience, by analyzing which angles on stories are over-performing with an audience but are underreported.

We also plan to use algorithms to analyze whether a story is likely to be true, false, or biased based on source and other characteristics, and are working on making our recommendations much more powerful, such as: “Here’s what your audience will like today.”...