We can see that in social network analysis, marketing, opinion researches sentiment analysis has made serious mark. Web scrapping provides huge data sets and provides making conclusions and that all is making a new era in statistical analysis.
Is there a place for classical macroeconometrics?
I have seen some text analysis for international business, also I can see that for micro problem you can easily use, let say R's RQDA and that topic modeling can have its place in text analysis of any kind.
Also, I do know that in private sector machine learning is applied for forecasting.
But, yet it seems that academia is rigid in that sense.