A year ago, I dabbled with word clouds to see what headlines about emerging markets might reveal. Doing the same exercise for every quarter since 2006 shows some interesting trends, particularly in 2007 and 2008, where the importance of topics such as risk, growth and crisis changes over time. Early evidence from 2009 suggests – optimistically? – that the overall news from emerging markets now is quite similar to 2006! Read more
Having recently discovered the fantastic word-cloud abilities of wordle.net, I decided to play around with it. I took the top 500 stories on Google News, for the term ‘Emerging Markets’, from June 2008. I had to make quite a few adjustments to take out names of newspapers etc., and the cleaning still isn’t complete, but nonetheless, this kind of thing will probably become a lot more common as we try and develop ways of managing the flood of information out there.
Perhaps no surprises in the word cloud, but I still found it very interesting. Growth, inflation and investment/investors are the major news topics online for emerging markets. Oil and demand are also important. I find it interesting that global is so large – presumably that’s the online news world coming to terms with the ever greater importance of emerging markets in the global economy. Previously ‘hot topics’ such as development or sustainability don’t really register, while emerging topics such as diversification or decoupling are not taking centre stage yet.
