i. It’s important to point out that media does not always positively influence the world, nor do its effects necessarily relate to any intention [see (L. Bennett, “Toward a Theory of Press-State Relations in the United States,” Journal of Communication 40, no. 2 [June, 1990]: 103–127, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460- 2466.1990. tb02265 . x / abstract ); (H. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time [Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1979] ); (E. Herman and N. Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media [New York: Pantheon Books, 1988] ); and (J. Mermin, Debating War and Peace: Media Coverage of U.S. Intervention in the Post-Vietnam Era [Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 1999] )]. Research has shown, for instance, that increased exposure to certain media outlets was associated with fundamental misperceptions about the Iraq War [ (R. Lewis et al., “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War,” Political Science Quarterly 118, no. 4 [Winter 2003]: 569–598, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ j . 1538 - 165X . 2003 . tb00406 . x / abstract )]. Despite attempts by some papers to correct the errors in their reporting [see, for example, (NYT editors, “The Times and Iraq,” The New York Times, 26 May 2004, http : / /www.nytimes .com/ 2004 / 05 / 26 / international / middleeast/26FTE_NOTE.html )], a Harris Interactive Poll in 2008 found that a shock- ingly high 37 percent of Americans still believed that Saddam Hussein was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the U.S.-led invasion [ (Harris Interactive, “Significant Minority Still Believe that Iraw Had Weapons of Mass Destruction When U.S. Invaded,” 10 November 2008, http : / / www . harrisinteractive . com / vault / Harris - Interactive - Poll - Research - Iraq - 2008 - 11 . pdf )]. Psychological experiments back these empirical and theoretical findings, reliably demonstrating how media frames—or lenses through which issues are defined and/or explicated—influence readers’ perceptions [ (T. Nelson et al., “Media Framing of a Civil Liberties Conflict and Its Effect on Tolerance,” The American Political Science Review 91, no. 3 [September, 1997]: 567–583, http://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS234/articles/nelson.pdf )].
ii. This isn’t an official title and we’ll use it to refer to what is sometimes just one person or, alternatively, a small team. In our research, this role varies widely from full-time positions to a single person who juggles impact and analytics reports with numerous other duties.
iii. Jason Alcorn and Lauren Fuhrman of InvestigateWest and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, respectively, will look at best practices for impact reporting. Jessica Clark of Media Impact Funders will address the issue of how foundations could best interact with newsrooms.
iv. In this version, we chose to sort these articles by page views. A proposed idea for the future would see the entire list of metrics be customizable. We sort by page views instead of publish date (which would be the other logical choice), because Google Analytics takes at least a day to populate data. As a result, the dashboard would always show incomplete data for organizations that publish daily. As the system grows to support other metrics, this view-starting position could be customizable as well.
v. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t guarantee a return of every tweet in its search results. Only through access to the Twitter firehose would a comprehensive list be possible.
vi. One company, CrowdTangle, promises to do this by monitoring a large number of Facebook pages for an organization’s content. It is a paid service. An open source and community-maintained repository would be one interesting alternative for democratizing this kind of insight.
vii. Taxonomically she is an “Impcat,” a rare breed of lynx adept at measuring impact.