Research Purpose: 

In recent years, MEAG has partnered with the City University of New York’s Center for Community Media (CCM) on a range of media analysis projects, producing insightful and relevant findings on community-level media ecosystems. CCM has undertaken several large scale efforts to create directories of community media, and has then looked to MEAG to 1) integrate these directories into the Media Cloud database and tooling, and 2) analyze content emanating from these directory publications. 

Results:
The preliminary collaborative project between the two organizations, initiated in 2019, focused on adding a US Latino news media directory developed by CCM into the Media Cloud database. MEAG’s research team then supported an independent researcher, Ronny Rojas, in analyzing the content of the publications contained in the directory. This bilingual research effort used Media Cloud to understand the topics of news published by and for Latino communities in the US, and highlighted potential areas where coverage is inadequate or fertile ground for mis/disinformation. The resulting report, The State of Latino News Media, covers findings from this project. 

The second collaborative project focused on Black media, again integrating a directory developed by CCM into Media Cloud’s database, and using the tooling to complete a content analysis. In this iteration, MEAG’s Emily Boardman Ndulue was the report author, completing a white paper highlighting differences in attention to various topics and language and frames used between Black media and mainstream media. The resulting report, Why Black Media Matters Now, has been used to catalyze advocacy and funding for the Black press, which the data shows serves an important role in contextualizing current stories within the arc of history. The report found that Black media in aggregate covers unique topics and with greater historical context and often a more humanized frame than mainstream media. 

Most recently, the partnership explored key coverage areas for community media in the state of New York, analyzing publications from a directory assembled by CCM. Differences between New York City-area publications and publications from elsewhere in the state were noted, highlighting important areas in which major news topics were framed differently between the two geographic sets. 

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