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What the picker changes
  • Top topics digest — the cards score the selected period against the prior 4 weeks.
  • 12-week heatmap & outlet matrix — show the 12 weeks ending at the selected week (they slide back with the picker, they aren’t a fixed snapshot).
  • Per-topic volume / alias drift — same 12-week trailing window, anchored on the selected period.
  • Coverage gap quadrant — scores the selected period against the 12 weeks before it (not including it).
  • Anomaly cards — only show alerts the detector fired during the selected period. Quiet weeks legitimately show none.
What stays as-is
  • Outlet orientation strip / lean colours — context-only, drawn from the last 12 weeks of activity regardless.
  • Co-occurrence graph — recent-activity anchored, not picker-driven.
  • Source & topic profiles — all-time data for the topic; the picker doesn’t affect them.
Rolling 7 days is a sliding live window for “current vibes”; switch to Weekly to compare specific weeks side-by-side.
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Topic

Regional Council Accountability

46 items · 7 aliases · peaked week of 17 May 2026 · first seen 10 May 2026

A Ruapehu district mayor discusses the severe weekend flooding in Ohura, highlighting failures in weather forecasting, flood warning systems, and emergency response that left residents unprotected and in crisis.

Volume by source orientation Methodology →

Stacked weekly counts; colour by lean. “n/a” covers government and iwi-Māori sources where lean isn't applicable.

Alias drift

How this topic has been named, week by week. A new alias winning out is usually a framing shift.

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In the press Methodology →

How the news corpus has covered this same topic over the last 12 weeks. 2 articles from RNZ, Stuff, NZ Herald, ODT, 1News, Newsroom and The Spinoff. Click through to the press view for the full panel.

12-week press volume 2 articles
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Heard on radio

Verbatim segments from politicians speaking on podcasts and radio shows about this topic. Sourced via the voice-reference library — each speaker has been confirmed manually from their voice clip. Click play to stream the original audio from the publisher, pre-seeked to the moment the quote starts.

  • Uh I wouldn't see it that way. Um, I wouldn't say that overall means making decisions for local communities. I do think that we need to get, for example, Wellington out of Auckland. Um they shouldn't be making decisions for Auckland's future. Uh what this is really about, you think about the panel more like a financial advisor, right? You have uh certain five uh financial wealth aspirations, you want to go about and set up a investment portfolio, um, or other and other types of uh aspirations. And what you need to do is get your uh your fundamentals right. Uh this is about making sure you don't make mistakes and that you actually uh uh maximize your returns. So uh cities are economic engines. They are um they need to be able to grow, they need to be able to grow our salaries, they need to be able to uh enable people to move and uh have freedom to locate to move to where they can work and actually be more productive. And that's basically really what this is about is about enabling them, giving them the advice they need uh so that they can uh make the choices they want, to have their own stories, write their own essays, but make sure that we are grading them, technically assessing them and getting the grammar right.
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Sample framings

Up to 12 framings spread across orientations. Each framing is a short phrase the topic extractor generated to characterise the piece's stance — not a quote from the source. Click through to read the original.

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How the public reacted

Social-media signal on the same topic, drawn from the social lens. Engagement is likes + 2×shares + 3×replies, the same weighting used across the digest cards. View on /social →

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