News-based indicators are in vogue in economics. But they tend to be applied with little consideration for the properties of news itself. In this paper, we try to shed light on the nature of this type of data. Drawing from established findings in communication science and journalism studies we...

This paper deals with the problem of deriving consistent time-series from newspaper contentbased topic models. In the first part, we recapitulate a few our own failed attempts, in the second one, we show some results using a twin strategy, that we call prototyping and seeding. Given the...

In this paper, we present a new indicator to measure the media coverage of inflation. Our Inflation Perception Indicator (IPI) for Germany is based on a corpus of three million articles published by broadsheet newspapers between January 2001 and February 2022. It is designed to detect thematic...

In this paper, we present a new dynamic topic modeling method to build stable models and consistent time series. We call this new method RollingLDA. It has the potential to overcome several difficulties researchers, who use unsupervised probabilistic topic models, have grappled with: namely the...

In this paper we update our Uncertainty Perception Indicator (UPI) with data from the first quarter of 2021. UPI values have declined in recent quarters. At first glance this might come as a surprise, with the third Corona wave having less of an impact than the first one, even though the former...

In this paper, we present a new indicator to measure the media coverage of inflation. Our Inflation Perception Indicator (IPI) for Germany is based on a corpus of three million articles published by broadsheet newspapers between January 2001 and February 2022. It is designed to detect thematic...