This period’s media story
Plain-English observations generated from the same anomaly, lead-lag, and alias-drift signals that drive the rest of the site. Methodology →
Who leads, who lags, who’s missing the story. Findings are derived from 7 outlet we read plus the public-discourse corpus over the last 12 weeks. Updated weekly. Every claim links to the underlying data. Methodology →
Coverage through 6 Jun 2026 · analysis updated 3h ago
Plain-English observations generated from the same anomaly, lead-lag, and alias-drift signals that drive the rest of the site. Methodology →
Cost Of Living And Economic Collapse is being discussed publicly but 1 of 7 outlets have been quiet on it this period.
see the topic → Report this finding4 outlets shifted framing on Treaty Of Waitangi Reinterpretation from “treaty of waitangi identity” to “treaty of waitangi symbolism”.
see the framing chain → Report this findingPress reporting led public discourse on Media Accountability by 4 weeks (r=1.00).
see the topic → Report this findingPress reporting led public discourse on Move On Orders by 4 weeks (r=0.98).
see the topic → Report this findingPublic discourse led press reporting on Political-Transparency by 4 weeks (r=0.92).
see the topic → Report this findingPer-outlet snapshot over the last 12 weeks: articles published, editorial lean (with link to how leans are assigned), and how each outlet tracks the discourse corpus on its balanced topics. Outlets with fewer than 20 articles in the window are hidden — the sample is too thin to read.
| Outlet | Lean | Articles 12 wk |
Lead/lag vs discourse | Top topics | Coverage gaps |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Stuff
stuff
|
Centre-left | 3,173 |
leads discourse
−0.3w avg
· 3 topics
|
||
|
RNZ
rnz
|
Centre | 2,417 |
lags discourse
+0.7w avg
· 6 topics
|
||
|
NZ Herald
nzherald
|
Centre-right | 2,074 |
lags discourse
+1.0w avg
· 3 topics
|
||
|
Otago Daily Times
odt
|
Centre | 1,911 |
in step with discourse
−0.2w avg
· 4 topics
|
||
|
1News (TVNZ)
tvnz
|
Centre | 1,492 |
in step with discourse
0.0w avg
· 4 topics
|
||
|
The Spinoff
spinoff
|
Centre-left | 422 |
in step with discourse
+0.2w avg
· 8 topics
|
||
|
Newsroom
newsroom
|
Centre | 338 |
lags discourse
+0.9w avg
· 8 topics
|
Topics where the public is talking, but the press is mostly quiet. Pulled from the top-left quadrant of the press × discourse comparison: discourse volume well above its 12-week mean, press volume flat or below. Methodology →
Topics where the dominant phrase moved this period, plus how many outlets adopted the new phrasing in the last 14 days. Lifted from the term-drift detector that powers the OpenBrief Pro brief. Methodology →
Short version of the rules behind every claim on this page; the full methodology covers the data sources, lean assignment, balance filter, and corrections process.
Press coverage from the seven NZ news outlets on /press. Public discourse from commentary, press releases and podcast transcripts on /discourse. Both corpora map onto the same canonical topic taxonomy so cross-corpus comparisons are apples-to-apples.
A topic only enters the lead-lag, gap, and outlet-scorecard analyses when it has at least 5 items in each corpus over the 12-week window. Single-spike topics and corpus-dominated outliers are excluded so the cross-corpus comparison reads cleanly. Methodology →
Outlet leans (left, centre-left, centre, centre-right, right, n/a) are editor-assigned at outlet onboarding and reviewed when an outlet’s editorial line visibly shifts. We do not score individual articles for bias; the page reports observations, not verdicts. Methodology →
Pearson correlation between an outlet’s weekly volume on a topic and the discourse corpus’s weekly volume on the same topic, evaluated at lag offsets from −4 to +4 weeks. The reported tendency is the average best-lag across the outlet’s balanced topics. Positive lag means the outlet trails discourse; negative means it leads.
No scoring of outlets for “bias” or “accuracy”. No LLM-generated prose. No predictions about what will or won’t be covered. No findings on small denominators — outlets below 20 articles in the window are hidden, and topics below 5 items per corpus are excluded.
Every finding carries a “Report this finding” link that opens a correction request pre-filled with the finding’s text. Submissions land in the same workflow that runs the rest of the site — see the public corrections log.
Spotted something wrong on this page? Report a correction.