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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.
live window
NZ political discourse

This week, in commentary, press releases & podcasts

Topics, framings, and source patterns derived from the discourse corpus — written commentary plus podcast transcripts, joined on the same canonical topics. Click any card or heatmap row for the full topic detail. Methodology →

Coverage through 22 Jul 2026 · topic analysis updated 32m ago

Anomalies this week Methodology →

Topics, MPs, or sources whose volume jumped sharply versus their prior 4-week mean. Detected automatically and reviewed for noise before display.

topic
×4.7 7 this week vs 1.5 prior
18 Jul
topic
×8.0 4 this week vs 0.5 prior
18 Jul
topic
×9.3 7 this week vs 0.8 prior
18 Jul
topic
×14.0 7 this week vs 0.5 prior
18 Jul
topic
×20.0 5 this week vs 0.2 prior
18 Jul
topic
×5.0 5 this week vs 1.0 prior
18 Jul
topic
×3.2 4 this week vs 1.2 prior
18 Jul
topic
×6.7 5 this week vs 0.8 prior
18 Jul
topic
×6.7 5 this week vs 0.8 prior
17 Jul
topic
×12.0 6 this week vs 0.5 prior
17 Jul
topic
×20.0 5 this week vs 0.2 prior
17 Jul
topic
×5.0 5 this week vs 1.0 prior
17 Jul

Top topics — Last 7 days Methodology →

The canonical topics with the most coverage across commentary and podcast transcripts in the trailing 7 days — a sliding window, so the cards keep working through the Monday handover. The trend figure compares the selected period to its prior 4-week mean. The stance bar (where visible) shows the supportive → critical mix on classifier-tagged edges. Distinct from the Anomalies above, which surface step-change spikes rather than absolute volume.

Treaty Of Waitangi Implementation
14 items -8%

practical realization of partnership principles

Fuel Price Inflation
11 items +4300%

rising US gas prices with market speculation and economic ripple effects

Consent And Sexual Violence Law Reform
11 items new

updating legal standards to reflect modern values

Cost-Of-Living Crisis
11 items +193%

urgent and widespread, threatening household stability

Union Automatic Enrolment
11 items +4300%

expands workers' rights through default inclusion

12-week topic landscape Methodology →

Each cell = items mentioning that topic in that week. Top 25 by recent volume.

Source × topic sparklines Methodology →

A cross-tab of which sources are talking about which topics, week by week. Rows are the 10 topics with the most coverage in the last four weeks; columns are the 8 sources writing about them most. Each tiny line is 12 weekly counts — the path shape tells you whether the source is just-now picking up the topic, sustaining attention, or letting it fade. The trailing dot marks the most recent week, the number under the line is the 12-week total, and the column-header pill is the source’s editorial lean (which tints the line). Cells with no coverage render as a dashed midline so “quiet” reads differently from “missing data”.

Why we offer a reach-weighted view — click to expand

A 30-item run in a 500-reader Substack and a 5-item run in Stuff (~2.3M monthly readers) look identical when you count articles. They are not the same thing. The same topic is being published more often in one place but heard far more in the other.

Toggling to reach-weighted multiplies each cell by log1p(source_reach_score) — a dampened weight that preserves tail-source visibility (small blogs don’t collapse to zero) while letting major-outlet coverage outweigh long-tail volume. This isn’t a quality judgement; it’s a closer answer to the question “whose attention has this topic actually captured?”. Source reach scores are described in full on the methodology page.

Item count answers “who’s writing about this most?”. Reach-weighted attention answers “whose attention has it actually captured?”. Same data, different question.

Topic ↓ / Source →
Waatea News Government / N-A
Point of Order Centre-right
The Spinoff Centre-left
integrity-institute Government / N-A
Cost Of Living Pressures On Events 100 9 4 7 7 2 6 1
Treaty Of Waitangi Implementation 113 1 4 3 2 · · ·
Cost Of Living 51 17 5 5 7 5 3 4
Māori Health Equity 76 1 2 1 1 · · ·
Treaty Of Waitangi Reinterpretation 18 11 15 8 5 2 · 3
Housing Affordability 35 3 5 4 4 1 1 ·
Government Accountability 11 9 9 4 1 6 1 3
India-Nz Free Trade Agreement 6 1 1 3 1 4 2 3
Cost-Of-Living Crisis 3 6 1 · 1 · 3 ·
India-Nz Strategic Ties 2 · · 1 3 3 2 2
Free account Create a free account for reach-weighted attention + per-source reach scores — every cell weighted by audience size, so you see whose attention a topic actually captured. Create a free account Log in
Topic co-occurrence graph Methodology → Topics that show up in the same articles. Drag a node to rearrange; click to drill in.

Each bubble is one canonical topic; size scales with how many items mentioned it over the last eight weeks. A line connects two topics that appear in the same articles — thicker lines mark the most distinctive pairings, not just the busiest. Colour groups topics into clusters (each named after its biggest topic); to keep things readable only the largest bubbles are labelled — hover any node to see the rest and its closest neighbours.