Founding statement
Prism News
A founding statement for a publication that maps the field of reporting instead of producing another summary.
Essays & Research
The ideas, methods and accumulated findings behind Prism.
Prism publishes a map of the day’s coverage. This section explains the form, studies what repeated maps reveal, and reports honestly on the instrument used to make them. Research developed from that work is published in the institutional voice of Prism Research.
PUBLICATIONS
Prism Research
The Prism Research Programme
A programme for studying circulation, framing and public knowledge across time.
Temporal framing
The News in the Accomplished Tense
Across 267 articles in one Prism edition, the decisive temporal choice was often not where an event began, but what it had already become.
Narrative framing
Interpretive Annexation in News Coverage
A field study of how established narratives recruit new events as evidence, import conclusions and displace event-specific questions.
THE PROGRAMME
The daily edition is one part of Prism’s public work. As its observations accumulate, this section will publish four clearly labelled forms. They sit together because they inform one another, not because they make the same kind of claim.
Research reports
Studies of a defined corpus over a stated period, including source ecology, recurring frames, geographical cohorts and changes in coverage over time.
Technical reports
Studies of Prism as an instrument: its failure modes, evaluations, retrieval limits, method changes and lessons from operation.
Methods notes
Narrower records of revised definitions, new audits, changes to the source roster and limitations discovered during a study.
Essays
Arguments and interpretations that may go beyond measurement, presented in an authorial voice and labelled separately from findings in the daily map.
The first extended research cycle will begin with a six-week field report and a parallel technical account of what Prism learned from sustained operation. The standards for that work are set out in The Prism Research Programme. Changes to the instrument itself remain available in the research record.
