Conclusion
In future work, the search terms could be expanded to include a more general terms like cryptocurrency (rather than a particular currency like bitcoin), or related terms like blockchain (the underlying technology that powers the distributed ledger), or specific financial terms like “fintech” or “bitcoin options”.
As above, this analysis would need to be repeated for a number of different publications and cities to conduct a comparison, as well as statistical tests for differences in counts. Additionally, sentiment analysis and other NLP techniques that go beyond word frequencies may be pertinent and could highlight further insights regarding this area of research, i.e. reporting regarding the introduction of a new digital currency and its reception in different cities around the world.
The current analysis demonstrated that in the last two years, the last three months were the most active of reporting by the New York Post on bitcoin. In identifying the popular authors, one sees that the majority of all articles are written by a handful of authors. Perhaps this may be related to specialty area or desk assignment.
Additionally, the most popular word besides bitcoin and after removing common words (stop words), the term “ransom” was identified. The articles that were published with that headline occurred earlier in the summer and in the last year. It would be interesting to compare the popular words from other publications to see if there are other perspectives that might have been popular at that time or if these events dominated the headlines in a majority of cities.
Overall, this was an interesting pilot project and it would be great to continue with this to explore further techniques such as network analysis through on as emerging way of analyzing public media perception on emerging topic.