Insights from the political corpus

Agenda setting Methodology →

Which channel surfaces topics first? The donut shows the overall first-mover distribution across all multi-channel topics. The table below shows channel share-of-voice per topic — where each topic’s coverage actually lives. Topics dominated by one channel (e.g. 80% social / 5% news) surface gaps between public conversation and press coverage.

Channel share-of-voice

Each cell shows what percentage of this topic’s total normalised attention comes from each channel. Raw counts are adjusted for channel volume — so social’s thousands of posts and news’s tens of articles are placed on a comparable scale. The small number underneath is the raw item count.

Topic lifecycle Methodology →

How long do topics persist? Each topic is classified as persistent (still near peak), decaying (fading), flash (one-week spike), or resurgent (bounced back after a dip). In the chart, the further right a topic sits the closer it still is to its peak (its momentum); the higher it sits the more total coverage it drew; bubble size is its peak week. Half-life estimates how many weeks until volume halves from peak.

Cross-channel anomaly clusters Methodology →

Topics that triggered volume spikes in two or more channels within the trailing 6 weeks. Each card shows the peak spike ratio per channel (e.g. ×5.2 means 5.2× the prior 4-week average). Synchronised anomalies are stronger signals than isolated spikes.

Actor trajectories Methodology →

Per-actor weekly mention volume across all channels (news, commentary, audio, social) over the trailing 6 weeks. The chart shows each actor’s total mentions per week; the table shows channel breakdown and stance sentiment from commentary sources.

Echo chambers & framing divergence Methodology →

Topics where left-leaning and right-leaning commentary sources both have coverage (minimum 5 items per side), with per-stance breakdowns. The divergence score compares the proportion of critical coverage on each side, normalised for volume: 0% means both sides criticise the topic at the same rate; 100% means one side is entirely critical while the other is not at all. Raw stance counts are shown so you can judge the sample size yourself. Source orientation labels come from our hand-curated taxonomy.

Talk radio exclusives Methodology →

Topics discussed on talk radio (transcribed audio) that are absent or minimal in written media. These represent the parallel conversation happening on air that journalists haven’t picked up — or can’t cover.

Money & narrative Methodology →

Organisations with recorded donations or Meta ad spend, alongside their media footprint. Does money correlate with coverage? Note: correlation is not causation — parties with more money tend to be larger parties that naturally attract more coverage.

Where an organisation is a tracked lobby group or think tank Lobby, its name links to the full influence dossier and we show its earned-media reach — confirmed press, radio and commentary pickups and the number of distinct outlets reached over the last year. For these groups that earned footprint is a truer read on narrative penetration than the party-mention counts, which track named MPs rather than the group itself.

Follow the money: third-party & union spend Methodology →

Disclosed money footprint per organisation — party donations received plus independent advertising spend across the currently-observable sources. Filter by left/right to compare totals and spread; trade unions are highlighted. Independent spend is legally separate from parties — alignment is not coordination.

These are still different disclosure windows, not one comparable period — read each bar as “disclosed money we can currently see for this actor,” not spend within a single timeframe:

• Donations — Electoral Commission >$20,000 register, disclosed in real time but only published in election years; non-election-year totals are sparse by design, not zero. We are currently in the 2026 election year.
• Meta ads (Facebook/Instagram) — rolling, every political/issue ad in our corpus from 2020 to now.
• Google ads (Search/YouTube) — cumulative advertiser totals over the lifetime of Google’s NZ political-ads programme.

Regulated third-party promoter returns — which carry the newspaper and other print spend no digital ad library captures — are reported per election cycle. The latest published set is from the 2023 General Election; see the per-medium breakdown on the 2023 election page. The methodology covers each source’s exact coverage and caveats.