Paper written for the CIRET 2012 conference

The purpose of our study is to find an answer to how real economic processes and their online media representation are connected, that is, whether the economic crisis of 2008-2009 has generally changed the way how Hungarian journalists use economic terms and expressions and whether a learning procedure has begun of a more informed and proficient form of journalism about economic processes.

Based on our analysis we can state that the occurrence of economic terms in connection with economic policy, foreign trade, companies and the crisis contain a break in the trend at the start of the crisis. We can say that because of the crisis the word usage rates within the above word groups increased significantly – except in the case of the foreign trade group, where it fell.

We can also say that knowledge of the occurrence of the economic policy, credit, macroeconomy, financial market, company and crisis word groups provide additional information to estimate industrial sales about a month in advance as compared to if we only use the previous two values of the time series for our estimation.