News Sniffer Blog » News Sniffer

Guardian articles are now tracked

johnl — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 07:04:10 +0000

News Sniffer now tracks Guardian news articles for changes. You can limit searches to The Guardian (or BBC) by using the keyword source:guardian or source:bbc in your searches. By default, both sources are searched at once.

If you’re a Ruby programmer, you can add support for other news sources to News Sniffer by extending the Web Page Parser library, the code is available over there on Github. Happy hacking!

Missing articles, BBC World News and others

johnl — Sun, 15 May 2011 18:00:18 +0000

News Sniffer has just been updated to fix a bug where many BBC news articles were being missed (especially any sub category of world news). This started happening when the BBC updated their url structure a few months ago. Sorry that it’s not been caught until now.

Revisionista broken, will be fixed soon

johnl — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 09:35:57 +0000

Due to a recent change at the BBC, Revisionista can no longer properly detect changes in articles. To fix this, I’ve brought forward plans for a new version of Revisionista. This should be up and running within a couple of weeks.

The new version will fix these problems, but also make it much easier to fix if things change again in the future. It will be much easier to add additional news sources too – so stay tuned for a great new Revisionista.

In the mean time, sorry for the inconvenience.

UPDATE: The BBC seem to have made more changes and now Revisionista is working again, thanks BBC!

The Register references News Sniffer

johnl — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:05:56 +0000

The Register used News Sniffer’s Revisionista to track the changes of a BBC article on the ID cards.

The report’s revision history, documented by News Sniffer, takes us on an impressive Odyssey from “Smith to unveil airport ID scheme”, through “Shops may take ID Card biometrics” to the final sales-pitch version, cunningly deniabled with quote marks.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/14/bbc_stories_cant_wait/

Upgrade: wym comment cleanup, downtime, and improved search

johnl — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:13:53 +0000

News Sniffer was down for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon whilst I upgraded the software that runs it. This fixes a few display bugs and more importantly patches up another problem where bbc comments were being misclassed as censored. The misclassification was due to a mistake when handling british summer time, so it’s only been prevalent since the end of March. We double checked all censored comment from the last few months and removed any misclassified ones.

Due to the downtime whilst we cleaned and reindexed the database, some news articles and bbc comments were not added to the database so will not be tracked. So, if you’re looking for a particular news article published yesterday afternoon, it’s likely that it is missing. Apologies for the inconvenience.

The biggest new feature is vastly improved search system.

It works like most search engines, so just type keywords in and you get results. You can be a bit more advanced too though. Say you want to find all censored bbc comments by the author ‘John Smith’. Do a search for:

author:"john smith"

You want all the comments mentioning the NHS but to exclude any mentioning Patricia Hewitt:

nhs -hewitt

Maybe you want to find all censored bbc comments with the words ‘iran’ and ‘bomb’ made in April 2007:

iran bomb created_at:200704*

To find a particular bbc comment, you can search on the bbc’s own comment id number:

bbcid:bbcid:2481215

To get all Revisionista news articles with the work ‘iraq’ in the title published today (19th April 2007):

title:iraq created_at:20070419

The BBC Have Your Say search is here, and the Revisionista news article search is here. Happy searching!

New domain name

johnl — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 15:36:01 +0000

News Sniffer now has its own domain name: www.newssniffer.co.uk
The old address (newssniffer.newworldodour.co.uk) will automatically redirect you, but update your bookmarks!

No updates for the last 2 days

johnl — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:23:01 +0000

Apologies but due to a VPN problem, News Sniffer has not been monitoring news articles or Have Your Say forums for the last 2 days. All working again now though. I’ll set up some alerting system to prevent this happening again.

BBC Editors blog about News Sniffer

johnl — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 17:54:22 +0000

The BBC Editors blog has mentioned News Sniffer today.

It’s largely just marginalised us, but it’s rather ambiguous. When they suggest that Revisionista will not find examples of bias, I can’t decide if they mean that the BBC is not biased, or that they are just very good at it.

Some of the recommended revisions are interesting, but maybe we need a comments feature so people can explain and discuss their recommendations.

And they also describe their censoring of ‘Have Your Say’ comments as “censoring” in quotation marks. I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean either. Is it not censorship when they remove comments? Or do they not remove comments?

See the top recommended censored comments for some interesting examples of “censorship”.

BBC Radar

johnl — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 10:49:16 +0000

News Sniffer blipped on the BBC radar this week. Someone mailed their public “backstage” mailing list with a link and it eventually turned up on the backstage.bbc.co.uk blog.

Richard Sambrook, Director of BBC Global News, has commented too.

I’m not sure why he’s so Interested in what my name is, but I’ve added it clearly to the about page now. It’s not like it was a big secret.

An ex-BBC employee, Martin Belam, commented extensively on it too.

I also got invited to discuss News Sniffer on the backstage mailing list by Ian Forrester of the BBC. An archive of the mailing list is available. With a notable threads starting here. I posted some details of the inner workings of News Sniffer too.

News Sniffer Bias

johnl — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 22:01:11 +0000

In drumming up some more attention for News Sniffer, I e-mailed the Biased-BBC blog which then linked us in a posting. Some comments on their post brought up the issue of News Sniffer Bias. Here is a quick response I put together:

Hi,

I designed News Sniffer in order to help uncover bias in whatever form. I do have what might be described as “lefty” ideals, but I have no intention of fiddling the results (though the irony of the situation would not be lost on me

I guess my bias does show in which news organisations I’ve chosen to monitor (BBC, The Guardian, The Independent). All generally regarded as the “liberal” media.

News Sniffer’s current recommendation system is flawed though and very much open to bias. For example, if only smelly lefties visit the site and vote on censored comments and revisions then top recommended stuff will very likely be left-leaning.

I’m looking to replace this with more of a categorisation system, where users tag things with keywords rather than vote.

Additionally, I plan to release the code of the program under a free software license. This will allow anyone (with the know-how) to run their own News Sniffer and monitor their own news sources. Then people don’t *have* to trust me.

Whether you like it or not, it’s undeniable that there are valid topics that are completely unmentionable in *any* of the corporate media. Media Lens investigates some great examples of these. I hope that News Sniffer will help find examples of the bias towards this, whether considered in favour of the “Left” or “Right”.

At the end of the day, censorship in my favour is still censorship. News Sniffer is supposed to be about exposing censorship, not creating more of it.