365 Dots in 2019: Quantifying Attention of News Sources
Table 3. StoryGraph: Top news stories of 2018 (Alexander Nwala, 2018a) & 2019 (Alexander Nwala, 2019)
['[BOLD]  Ra- nk ', '[BOLD] Attn. score', '[BOLD] Date (MM-DD)', '[BOLD] News story']
Our investigation into measuring near-real time news similarity and quantifying the attention of news sources has resulted in the following contributions. First, we proposed the attention score, a transparent method for quantifying attention given to a news story by different news sources. The attention score facilitates finding the top news stories for a given day, month, or year. This enabled us to show the top stories of 2018 and 2019 Second, we introduced the StoryGraph service, which has been running for over two years (since August 8, 2017), generating news similarity graphs every 10 minutes from 17 news organizations across the left, center, and right partisanship spectrum. Stories surrounding the release of the Mueller Report (red dots in Fig. On March 22, 2019, Robert Mueller submitted his report to AG William Barr (attention score = 18.72). Two days later, AG William Barr released his summary (principal conclusions) of the report. This story received the most attention (attention score = 22.93) in 2019. AG William Barr’s principal conclusions of the Mueller report was received with skepticism by the Democrats who claimed the conclusions were highly favorable to President Trump. In contrast, the Republicans claimed the summary exonerated the President from any wrongdoing. The next top story in 2019 (blue dots in Fig. No. 2) with attention score of 18.60 was Speaker Nancy Pelosi ’s announcement of an official impeachment inquiry (September 24, 2019) four days after the whistleblower’s report. Similarly, at rank three (green dots in Fig.