In an effort to show how Media Cloud can be used in simple open source projects, I built a twitter bot this weekend. The premise is that the twitter bot @NYT_first_said tweets words whenever the New York Times uses them for the first time. My bot, @seen_it_news, searches a bunch of English language news sources (Washington Post, Wall St. Journal, USA Today, FOX News, among others) for uses of the word, and replies.
The Wall Street Journal was saying "rewirement" for 4 years before the New York Times did:https://t.co/O69rt0M3oh
— Hipster Media (@seen_it_news) January 26, 2018
It was a fun little project! I would love if the Media Cloud API could look up sources by url so this could be entirely automated, but one cannot be too picky! Tweepy was a joy to work with, as was grift, which was open-sourced at my previous company.
Anyways, give the bot a follow! My favorite discovery was that “metoo” was first used three years ago by USA Today, as an answer in a quiz about the original name of Yahoo!