NewsTracker
The newsroom tool that turned a story into a discipline.
- 2017–2018
- Creator
- sunset
In 2017 a Knight Foundation Prototype Fund grant funded a piece of software inside PBS NewsHour: a tool to identify and track sources of misinformation on social media.
Reporting on junk news at the time meant finding examples by hand and arguing from anecdote. NewsTracker replaced the anecdote with a dataset — surfacing sources systematically, tracking them over time, and making it possible to say what was actually spreading rather than what happened to get noticed. It’s what identified the clickbait publisher Cyrus Massoumi.
That dataset became the foundational research for a four-part investigation on the NewsHour in 2018. The investigation ended. The software didn’t: NewsTracker is the direct ancestor of CivicLens, and the reason a journalist ended up running a technology institute.