In today’s information-driven world, news websites publish several thousand stories a day. Many times, particularly in authoritarian regimes, changes are made to articles without any communication to readers. This can be due to political interference, or a nexus between the media and influential entities.
We are building a system to track censorship and inappropriate journalistic practice post-publication. We embarked on this project because we wanted the public to be empowered and hold journalism accountable. The project has a special focus on Asian countries.
The project has been funded through Magic Grant, awarded annually by the Brown Institue for Media Innovation, a collaboration between Columbia University and Stanford University.
Translations of the guide are available in the following languages.
# Library
pip install Flask
python flask/run.py
Newshub is expecting to have browser addons to allow users add articles they want to track. The Browser addon will indicate whether an article is already in our database and whether changes have been made to the article. Readers will be able to add new articles and publications to our database and receive email alerts if they wish to.
We will also produce monthly reports and visualizations to help our readers better understand the data that we collect. Monthly reports will highlight publications that make major changes to their online articles with both stories and visualizations. We will also write individual stories on substantial changes related to important news events.
Newshub is the joint effort of the following Columbia graduates: Shujian Bu, Yue Qiu, Yi Du, Anirvan Ghost, Shiyao Zhu, Sophie Chou
We would like to credit Eric Price, Greg Price, and Jennifer 8. Lee for sharing the source code of Newsdiff. Thanks for the support from Prof. Mark Hansen and Shih-Fu Chang at Columbia University. Also, we would like to thank Scott Klein and Sisi Wei from ProPublica. Sravan Bhamitipati has also contributed to this project.
We welcome any suggestions or questions on the publication selection, data interpretation, algorithm, etc. If you have any stories about censorship and inappropriate journalistic practice post-publication, please also contact us at info@newshub.cc
