NSF Convergence Accelerator Track F: This project “undertakes a big data approach to the study of the “news life cycle” so that news organizations can “begin to re-establish sufficient levels of trust with the American people.” While most research in this arena has so far focused on national news organizations, the researchers aim to focus on local news for this project.

By using computational techniques like natural language processing and network analysis, the project’s primary goal is to develop a journalist-in-the-loop system able to track the life cycle of local journalistic content to observe its “uses and misuses across time and across digital platforms.”

“The proposed system will identify through reaction-intention analyses and topic drift those stages when journalism’s intended effects evolve into positive or negative unintended outcomes.”