EIJC18 & Dataharvest

FOI: Public relations companies have a large impact on media, public debate and lobbying efforts in all European countries. Their activities are often kept secret, and their influence on our democracy is difficult to explore. In this session, journalists show you how to use FOIA requests and datamining to get documents and data, that show how the public relations industry is working to influence journalists, politicians and people. This talk will also cover the use of machine learning and text mining in big data analysis of millions of news articles. The media survey company Retriever researches the impact of PR in the Norwegian news media. They have used machine learning to make it possible to follow the news story from its source and how it spreads. The same network model has been used to measure the degree of similarity between newspapers in Norway.