Greenpeace, a well known international environmental organisation, would like to know what the various media outlets are writing about their organisation, so that they know how they are perceived in the public and can adjust their strategy accordingly.
After I started working for them as an intern in 2009, my first digital job after uni, I discovered that they used a media crawling service called Meltwater to crawl through the top tier media websites in search for the word “Greenpeace”. After it it hits a match, it will return the link with the article back to Greenpeace.
A group of interns would make their way through this never ending list of articles and assign various categories and tags, a process known to them as “coding”. I thought that this process was rather cumbersome and started working on a PHP script that could do this partly automatically and for the part that couldn’t be done automatically, make it a lot easier.
I named this script “Almost but Not completely Automatic News Archiving Script”, or “ANANAS”. As I kept working on the tool, it grew into a website that reduced the time it took for coders to categorise news articles dramatically. Years after my departure from the organisation, I heard that the tool was refactored professionally and that it was still in use.
