Thanks Michael! This is really interesting. Decreasing demand by a few percent is a pretty big deal.
My intuition is that the number of articles published isn’t exact the right thing to regress on, probably instead you want something like “article views”. Did the authors discuss this? I guess if all the articles are published in equally-viewed sources, looking at just the raw article count would be fine.
Ya, that makes sense. They didn’t discuss this, specifically. It’s worth keeping in mind that their analysis went back to 1982, so I doubt they’d have good data on number of views/reads going that far back.
They did write:
Each index was built with searches of top US newspapers and magazines.
In particular the US Newspapers and Wires source option of Lexis–Nexis was used. Although specific analytic techniques of Lexis–Nexis are proprietary, the US Newspapers and Wires source was comprised of 606 individual sources as of 11 May 2010 which cover the geographical scope of the United States.
They also wrote that trying to distinguish articles by direction (positive or negative coverage), severity, and/or source would have introduced subjective elements to the analysis and wouldn’t have been feasible: there were 870 articles about cattle welfare in one quarter alone, at the maximum (although this was an outlier). There were also 606 sources in the database, but I don’t know how many of these ever covered animal welfare.
Thanks Michael! This is really interesting. Decreasing demand by a few percent is a pretty big deal.
My intuition is that the number of articles published isn’t exact the right thing to regress on, probably instead you want something like “article views”. Did the authors discuss this? I guess if all the articles are published in equally-viewed sources, looking at just the raw article count would be fine.
Ya, that makes sense. They didn’t discuss this, specifically. It’s worth keeping in mind that their analysis went back to 1982, so I doubt they’d have good data on number of views/reads going that far back.
They did write:
They also wrote that trying to distinguish articles by direction (positive or negative coverage), severity, and/or source would have introduced subjective elements to the analysis and wouldn’t have been feasible: there were 870 articles about cattle welfare in one quarter alone, at the maximum (although this was an outlier). There were also 606 sources in the database, but I don’t know how many of these ever covered animal welfare.