On June 8th, Martijn Kleppe (Faculty of Humanities) presented the set-up and first results of the Newstracker at the DHBenelux 2015 conference in Antwerp, Belgium. This tool, developed by Marco Otte of the Network Institute and supported by a Network Institute Academy Assistant aims to track the online behaviour of a group of 50 respondents. Participants installed a proxy in their web browser that tracked all visited websites. Overnight, the log file is being cleaned, only the URLs of 4.000 pre-defined websites are being saved and the textual and visual contents of news websites are being scraped and saved for later analyses. Currently, the fieldwork of the Newstracker is in its final phase and the first analyses have been made.
The Newstracker is part of the research project “The New News Consumer: User-based Innovation to Meet Paradigmatic Change in News Use and Media Habits” (see www.news-use.com), a collaboration between the VU University Amsterdam and the University of Groningen, sponsored by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Dutch journalism organizations Buitenhof, De Persgroep Nederland, EenVandaag, EO, NCRV, NDC Mediagroep, Nieuwsuur, and NOS Nieuws. The project is led by prof. dr. Irene Costera Meijer. Tim Groot Kormelink works as PhD student on the project.
For more information about the Newstracker, please contact Martijn Kleppe.