“Flow” as the New Unit of Analysis: Introducing Snowball Crawling and Named- Entity Recognition as a Methodological Toolkit for Media Research

The migration of journalism to online platforms caused a dramatic decline in traditional practices of the profession worldwide and a significant surge of journalism studies at the same time. The affordances of digital platforms, such as multimodality, interactivity, and immediacy, have redefined the meaning and operation of news. This chapter focuses specifically on research into one kind of news: aggregation and the methods used to study this emerging form of news production characterized by journalists churning out second-hand information on digital platforms. We conceptualize aggregated news as a flow, a new unit of analysis, that is compatible with empirical observations using the combined methods of snowball crawling and named-entity recognition. We believe this analytical toolkit, which enables researchers to trace the dynamic nature of digital news, represents a methodological breakthrough in content analysis.