Transgender Journalists’ Group Launches Media Analysis Tool

A journalists’ group has launched a data-visualization tool that provides close to real-time information on coverage of transgender people.

The Trans News Initiative  (opens in a new tab), launched in November by the Trans Journalists Association  (opens in a new tab), is a partnership between TJA, University of Miami journalism professor Alberto Cairo, and Polygraph, the marketing arm of the data-journalism publication the Pudding. Kae Petrin, TJA cofounder and current board chair, said the project was motivated by the need to provide members with a clearer snapshot of what trends are and aren’t being covered.

“We had been having a lot of internal conversations about how little data there is on some of the areas that we’ve been working on,” they said. Though academics do some of this work, Petrin said, “sometimes those studies are coming out two, three, or four years after they’re relevant, just due to the academic publication timeline.”

To provide a more current analysis—the website is updated monthly—the website is based on information from Media Cloud  (opens in a new tab), an open-source project that includes nearly 2 billion news stories globally. Cairo and Polygraph work alongside TJA staff and volunteers to update the site, which visualizes the depth of coverage by displaying keywords in larger or smaller circles. 

For instance, stories on the theme of “trans youth and parental rights” features sizable circles for “trans youth care bans” and “florida don’t say gay”; users can see visualizations of how much coverage those stories received between 2020 and today, and assessments of the bias of the publication (as assessed by third parties).

The Trans News Initiative website includes a thorough breakdown of the methodology  (opens in a new tab) behind the tool. Petrin notes that while Media Cloud can be used affordably by any association looking to create a snapshot of coverage in its industry, it’s also a demanding data-cleanup project. “Three of our five board members who were volunteers on the project have data journalism backgrounds,” Petrin said. “I don’t know how feasible the project would have been had we not had that expertise on our board.”

For example, search terms that may seem like natural fits can deliver red herrings. “If you pull ‘LGBTQ’ [as a search term], you get thousands of articles about RuPaul’s Drag Race,” they said. “Sometimes that’s wrapped into a conversation around trans communities. But the average recap of a queer TV show is not what we’re trying to capture in this.”

Petrin also recommends being alert to the different terms publications use to discuss similar topics; right-leaning publications, for instance, use the phrase “gender ideology,” which left-leaning and centrist publications avoid. 

Petrin said that the virtue of the project is that it clarifies the gaps in news coverage of transgender persons, particularly at the state level; while national stories about college athletes and healthcare funding grab the most attention, statehouse and municipal-level stories are relatively neglected. The initiative allows TJA and its members to better identify where to focus their energies.

“A lot of people just are not getting complete information about what’s going on in their states, about what’s going on with these bills, what’s going on with trans communities,” Petrin said. “Being able to point to that and say, ‘How about we cover more of this?’—that’s a huge step up from what we have been doing, which is, ‘We sort of think that this is happening.’”