Translated material
Electoral system
A new information product will help parties and politicians better know what the media say and write about them
On Tuesday, the Medialogia company, which readers of Vremya Novostey know well from the weekly ratings published by our newspaper, presented in Moscow the information and analytical system “Medialogia. Elections 2007". The system is designed to create an information picture in the media for the next federal elections. With the help of this system, experts promise users a complete, constantly updated information picture on all political subjects of Russia.General Director of the Medialogia company Nina Grigorieva said at the presentation that the product is intended for the leadership of parties, public and government organizations, international institutions, and the media. It was precisely because of the proximity of the election campaign that “Medialogy” organized a presentation of its long-term experiment. A subscription to a starter package of services, according to Vremya Novostey, is about $700 per month. The company has been monitoring a large information flow for four years now - experts promise a database of more than 3,000 media outlets (newspapers, magazines, news agencies, the Internet, radio and television). “Medialogy. Elections 2007" will allow you to see primarily the positions of parties and party leaders in the media, taking into account the authority of the source, the amount of attention to the object, and also track the dynamics of the situation. Now the dynamics can be traced over the past four years.
Ms. Grigorieva explained that in Russia no one has yet been successful in the field of information flow analysis, and the four-year experience of “Medialogy” gives reason to talk about a certain positive shift. “Since the amount of information being processed is abnormal, it is impossible to process it manually,” says Nina Grigorieva.
Ultimately, based on the results of media research, experts compile a so-called “information favorability index,” which characterizes the situation not only by the positive or negative tone of messages. This indicator takes into account quantitative as well as qualitative indicators of mention: the influence and categories of media, the quality of publications, their emotional connotation (positive or negative), the nature of mentions. Ultimately, the index of the analyzed situation may turn out to be both positive and negative.
Deputy General Director of the company Alexander Khromovichev showed the system in action: the results are clearly presented in the form of news feeds, ratings, graphs, histograms, and geographic maps. According to him, the data is updated automatically daily (about 30,000 publications are taken into account every day), and the transparency of the results is ensured by access to the original media reports - prints of newspaper pages and television videos. Of the 900 newspapers studied, only a third are available directly to experts in paper form, and TV channels in Moscow and the Moscow region are also being analyzed. It is planned to involve TV channels in St. Petersburg and ten major Russian cities in the study.
When asked by employees of the Central Election Commission how “positive” and “negative” are assessed in media reports, the experts replied that they do not specifically use legal norms, but proceed from universal objectivity and an already existing database, divided into positive and negative.
At the presentation, it turned out that the media are not ranked by owner during the analysis, since it is very difficult to determine this indicator in a dynamically changing market. Party websites and visual propaganda (booklets, leaflets) are also not analyzed, since these products do not fall into the category of “mass media”. At the same time, experts began working with Internet blogs.