Using Managing News to Trace a Story Back to Its Source

AJ Herrmann — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:34:06 +0000

I heard the news this morning that Hillary Clinton was dropping out of the Democratic primary race. As soon as I could, I went to Managing News where I’m tracking news about the candidates to see what was happening.

Right away I noticed that one keyword in particular received a huge spike: the Associated Press. Here’s a screenshot showing the jump in mentions of the AP today compared to the last two weeks in the political news I’m tracking.

The AP had been mentioned in about 0.5% of the stories pulled in by Managing News over the last two weeks. Today that figure jumped over ten-fold to 5.3%.

So why was there suddenly so much traffic around the Associated Press? The AP was reporting that Clinton will concede the nomination to Obama this evening after the results come in from Montana and South Dakota, and a lot of other sources were citing them on this.

That story drew an immediate retraction from Clinton campaign spokesperson Terry McAuliffe (who, as you can see shown in blue below, saw his own bump in mentions today).

Posts in the category: clinton

Using Managing News to Trace a Story Back to Its Source