Media Monitor App

Inspiration

The inspiration for this query app comes from my past experience as a public relations professional. In the spirit of DRY, I decided to create a web app to resolve the mundane task of monitoring daily media coverage on important keywords. The result is a query-based app where users can search the news for top coverage on a certain keyword, and also create a report that automatically searches for the top stories of all saved keywords. ###

How it works

The first page invites the user to enter any keyword, which leads to a page of search results based on the query, leveraging the open source search APIs from The Guardian and the NYTimes. ###

Challenges I ran into

There weren't a lot of APIs to choose from. My other options were USA Today (but that API did not have a query option as far as I could see) and NPR (which offered their API via xml instead of JSON). It was difficult refactoring my code to search multiple APIs but async.map proved to be a great tool.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of:

I created this app in 4 days, and it was my first web application.

What I learned

How to create an app from start to finish!

What's next for Media Monitor

I'd like to use Timeline.js and possibly Angular.js to do some data visualization of: past searches, sentiment per keyword etc...beyond just a coverage report, I'd like to imagine this as the experimental playground for new (possibly opensource) tools that newsrooms and small publications can use to test for balanced news coverage. ###

Built With

• async
• bcrypt
• bootstrap-and-masonry.js
• cookie-parser
• cookie-session
• cookie-session-apis:-the-guardian
• css
• ejs
• express.js
• html
• javascript-node.js
• jquery
• method-override
• new-york-times
• passport
• postgresql
• sequelize
• the-guardian