THE INTERNET DIDN’T MAKE TRAYVON NATIONAL NEWS, BUT IT DID SUSTAIN THE STORY

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For the Data Journalism assignment, I put my search for Luckiest Town in Massachusetts on hold and trained my sights on a more interesting story:

For weeks, the only Trayvon Martin coverage I saw was on Twitter, where every progressive I knew had shared a link to the Change.org petition. Eventually, I saw more media attention around the story. This led me to form a hypothesis that people talking about the story online, and specifically, linking to the Change.org petition, kept the story alive long enough for the national media to pick up on it.

I looked into all of the data I could find, including some provided by Change.org, and found out that my hypothesis was incorrect. But the story of how Trayvon Martin became national news, weeks after his death, is still a revealing portrait of our media.

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About mstem

Matt's a Research Assistant at the Center for Civic Media at MIT's Media Lab. He has spent his career at the intersection of technology and social change. He graduated with high honors from the University of Maryland College Park, where he wrote a thesis on the disruptive role of political blogs in journalism. He went on to join the strategy team at EchoDitto, a boutique consulting firm building cool technology for nonprofits, startups, and socially responsible businesses. Matt went on to direct new media at Americans for Campaign Reform, a bi-partisan grassroots effort, and the New Organizing Institute, where he helped to train the next generation of organizers. For most of this time, he also ran one of the most popular NetSquared groups in the world.

3 thoughts on “THE INTERNET DIDN’T MAKE TRAYVON NATIONAL NEWS, BUT IT DID SUSTAIN THE STORY”

    • You found the only nice looking graphic! Which, of course, was done by Pablo Rey (@numeroteca). I’d be happy to introduce you, but check out the rest of numeroteca.org, too!

  2. Matt, I hope you’ll talk at some length about this piece in class. It’s a great study of the power and limits of using statistics to explain this sort of story. I’m particularly gratified that you began with a thesis and managed to disprove it to yourself in the course of your investigations. Some great stuff in here, and some questions about how to tighten the data analysis into one or two killer graphics.

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