European Media Monitor

There’s some hyper-sophisto online stuff coming out of the EU. A while back I pointed you to the European Navigator, a complex search and education tool for the community. Now I’ve run across the Europe Media Monitor (EMM) [en français], a joint initiative of the European Commission Directorate General’s Joint Research Center and the Directorate General Communication .

Essentially, EMM offers you two views. The News Brief does pretty much what Google or Yahoo news does, in that it gathers together and excerpts current news stories. You can focus it in various ways to filter your news: Top Stories, 24 Hours Overview, by various themes, by region of the world or country, etc. And those news stories or releases pertaining to the European Commission or Court are hived off into a sidebar on the right.

The Court of Justice section, as do the others, offers an RSS feed that might prove useful. There’s a fairly decent advanced search function and, by the look of it, an RSS feed for your search unhampered by the required date range. A search for Canada or Canadian over the last month, turns up just under 7000 hits, and an RSS feed.

The News Explorer selects certain stories for you, depending on their popularity in the media. As the about page explains:

When clicking on the title of any of the major news stories, users can find out more about the story:

• the title and a short description of the most typical article on the story
• the list of other articles reporting about the same story (click any title to read more)
• the list of countries, cities, people and other entities mentioned in this news cluster
• a list of related news clusters (same language) published during the previous days (what happened before)
• a list of related news clusters in other languages (how was this story reported in other languages).

When clicking on any name, you may find further automatically derived information (when available), e.g. on:

• variant name spellings found in the news, both in the same and in different languages;
• titles and phrases found around the name: these tell you about the function, nationality, etc. of the person;
• a picture of this person;
• a list of the most recent articles mentioning this person (in the selected language);
• a list of related persons and organisations, i.e. names that are frequently mentioned together with the first person.

Thus, clicking on “Taliban kill 10 in Afghanistan Ambush” brings up: an Irish Times story filed at midnight CEST; a dozen related stories; an indication that four countries are “related” to the story, Canada being one of them, of course; Kandahar, Kabul and Toronto as “related places”; 24 “related people” among whom are Peter McKay and Stephen Harper (and a poor soul called Van Doos!). These relations are linked to pages where linkages are presented and analysed.

There’s a great deal more functionality, tedious to describe but less tedious to play with.

Although I find this interface over complex and using a design sensibility that’s different from the one I’m used to on this side of the sea (and even though it’s clearly untested on Macs, because some of the type is too small even to be rendered), I’d recommend that if you’d like your news without the North American or U.S. slant you should give this a try. Certainly if you’re job focuses you on Europe, or if you want to read news in a European language, this is for you. If nothing else, add the feed from the Court of Justice to your other court feeds.