Interactive Infographics and News Values

This experiment investigated the effects of television news frames on (1) audience interpretations of a political issue, (2) the salience of news frames versus other information in the story, and (3) support for future policy. A sample of 145 adults watched an experimental television news bulletin produced in cooperation with reporters and editors at a national television news program about the enlargement of the European Union. A news story was manipulated to reflect a conflict frame or an economic consequences frame. The two frames provide direction to the audience's thoughts about the issue but do not yield different levels of policy support. Frames in the news are as important as core facts in a news story when citizens conceive of a political issue.

Ubiquitous access to internet has resulted in more and more people going online to get their daily dose of news. In a 2010 survey conducted by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 41% of the respondents said they get most of their news online, 10% more than those who said they got most of their news from a newspaper. A lot of socio-technical factors have contributed to this phenomenal rise in adoption of online news in recent years. One of the biggest reasons why people are increasingly reading news online is because it facilitates discussion with peers (Nguyen 2010), offering different viewpoints which aid in forming a rounded personal opinion about the news story. The Pew survey found that 37% of online news users (and 51% of 18-29 year olds) think that commenting on news stories is an important feature to have. A lot of people tend to shape their opinion by reading discussion comments, reflective articles, blogs and even tweets about the news. Hence, an increasing number of people rely on online sources of news – be it news websites or news aggregator services like Digg, Reddit, Google Reader, Flipboard, Pulse etc. The problem with these news websites and aggregators is that the only way people can gather public opinion is by actively searching through the endless stream of comments and feeds, filtering out spam (which is a growing problem) and then reading the relevant posts. A top trending story on Twitter will typically see multiple tweets per second, and keeping up with the rapid flow of incoming tweets is quite cumbersome and cognitively taxing. Hence it becomes increasingly difficult and time consuming for someone who wants to get the pulse of the people affected by a news story. Furthermore, in certain scenarios people might want to look at more fine grained opinions. Currently, there is no elegant way to extract geographic and demographic impact of a news story. What is the public sentiment in Indonesia about the Arab Spring? How did the public opinion about the Wikileaks disclosures change as the story unfolded during the course of a year? It is very difficult and tedious to observe such patterns using the currently available news providers. This work attempts to solve these problems by proposing a news aggregator platform which pulls news stories from various sources and also aggregates public responses, reflections, opinions and sentiments associated with those stories. This data is presented in ways that are easily understandable so readers can make better sense of the stories unfolding across the globe. Such a news aggregator platform that gathers and display public opinion and sentiments about a story, must deal with various challenges – 1. Opinions are very subjective. Different people feel about a story in different ways. With such an enormous amount of diverse opinions and subjectivity, how can we possibly aggregate the responses into something that makes sense as a whole? ________________________________ Acknowledgements: Prof. Yardi, S. for the guidance Sethi, P. (2013). Public opinion aggregation by annotation and tagging of online news stories. iConference 2013 Proceedings (pp. 891-894). doi:10.9776/13453 Copyright is held by the author. iConference 2013 February 12-15, 2013 Fort Worth, TX, USA 892 2. There isn’t really a unified web standard for expressing opinion (in textual form). Some people tweet in 140 characters, while others write elaborate blog posts. Some websites employ tags which a reader can use to define and classify their public opinion, while others rely on threaded comments and comment ranking systems. How can a platform be flexible enough to adapt to all these varied standards so that it can extract valuable data from various sources? Perhaps the platform can create a new standard of expression on the web which is flexible and comprehensive enough to be used to express diverse views about every news story in the world. 3. How to filter out spam while extracting public opinion? 4. Once the platform has access to the data it needs, how should it be displayed to the reader in a way that makes sense? What forms of visualizations, illustrations and graphical representations can be employed to give the reader a holistic view of how people feel about a story? 5. How can the platform determine and convey effects of geographical, demographic and temporal variations as the story unfolds? These are just a few out of possibly many issues which must be dealt with. Previous research on similar public opinion aggregation services has greatly focused on natural language processing, data mining and text categorization and clustering. Xiaojun (2010) proposed a framework for crawling the web for comments and applying various data mining algorithms on the data to extract relevant information. Diakopoulos and Shamma (2010) used tweets posted in conjunction with the live presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain to gauge public opinion. Brody and Diakopoulos (2011) studied the use of word lengthening to detect sentiment in microblogs. This research proposes a solution – The Opinionated Reader, which relies on sentiment tags and annotations associated with a news story. The essential idea is to create a commenting, discussion and sharing plug-in which can be used by news websites and aggregators as a commenting solution for their news pages. Users wanting to share or comment on a news story through the plug-in are asked to tag the news story with sentiment tags and annotate the story with their reaction (happy/positive or sad/negative). These tags and annotations are stored, aggregated and linked to each news story. A mobile application provides the front-end interface for users to access the news stories and the aggregated sentiment associated with each story. The basic architecture is explained as follows: The Opinionated Reader – Mobile/Tablet App The app fetches news articles from various web sources, based on the interests and preferences configured by the user. In every news article, a portion of the screen real estate is reserved for Opinions which shows graphical visualizations and illustrations of the public opinion surrounding the news story. These visualizations include: A Sentiment Graph indicating the popular tags associated with the story (E.g.: “Shocking”, “Inspiring”, “Amusing” etc.). See Figure 1 for example visualization. A Positivity Graph which plots the level of positivity associated with the story on a time scale from when the news broke. See Figure 2 for example visualization. Figure 1. Example Sentiment Graph Figure 2. Example Positivity Graph iConference 2013 February 12-15, 2013 Fort Worth, TX, USA 893 The user can choose to see these visualizations for a particular time period in the evolution history of the news story, or for a specific country. The app also facilitates people to tag and annotate news articles from within its interface. The Opinionated Reader – Commenting and Sharing Web Plug-in These days, a common way of adding discussion and commenting functionality to news websites is by using 3 rd party services (like DISQUS). The Opinionated Reader is a similar service which can be embedded into the news articles of various news websites to enable commenting and sharing. When someone wishes to comment on an article, the comment is directed through this plug-in, which allows the users to annotate the article with the sentiment tags and reactions along with their comments. The Opinionated Reader saves this information along with the commenter’s location and date of comment (See Figure 3). Figure 3. The Opinionated Reader Web Plug-in 'Add Comment' dialog mockup The Opinionated Reader – Back-end The Back-end maintains a database of news items extracted from RSS feeds of various news websites. Each news article is linked with the sentiment tags and reaction/positivity annotations extracted from the comments and annotations gathered by the commenting plug-in. This data is used by the mobile/tablet app to generate visualizations (Sentiment Graph and Positivity Graph). The back-end also performs data mining on the tags and annotations for geographies and tracks the opinions across time. The back end system responds to queries received from the mobile app with the news story and associated tags and annotations, which are then rendered by the mobile app for the user. iConference 2013 February 12-15, 2013 Fort Worth, TX, USA 894 Discussion and Conclusion This design idea is still in a nascent state and has long hours of research, brainstorming, designing and development to go before it can be realized into something tangible. Twitter has grown exponentially in importance as a news source and it would be vastly valuable to integrate Twitter with The Opinionated Reader. Possibilities include use of special hash tags and natural language processing of tweets to extract public sentiment. The current design supports only two reaction annotations – positive and negative. Not every news story fits this annotation paradigm. Further research about human reactions to news stories might unveil interesting insights which would help zero in on a more robust annotation rubric. Lastly, since this service is envisioned to be non-curated and non-moderated, the value served by the app depends on the users themselves. Greater adoption will lead to more annotations and tags, which translates into a more accurate public opinion as presented to the user.

The portrayal of child autism-related news stories has become a serious issue in the United States, yet few studies address this from media framing perspective. To fill this gap in the literature, this study examined the applicability of a media framing scale (Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000) for the deductive examination of autism-related news stories in U.S.-based newspapers. Under the theoretical framework of framing theory, a content analysis of news stories (N = 413) was conducted to investigate the presence of the five news frames using an established questionnaire. Differentiating between local and national news outlets, the following five news frames were measured: (a) attribution of responsibility, (b) human interest, (c) conflict, (d) morality, and (e) economic consequences. Findings revealed that news stories about autism most frequently fell within the human interest frame. Furthermore, the study shed light on how local and national newspapers might differ in framing autism-related news pieces and in their placement of the autism-related story within the newspaper (e.g., front page section, community section).

The Internet is a major source of online news content. Current efforts are made to unlock latent meaning in online news content using advanced language processing tools and machine intelligence. This necessitates exploring the internal structure of news narratives to cope with the challenges posed by limitations of existing tools. This article explores the conceptualization of Double Subjectivity in news frames as deployed by online news sources. We propose a new perspective by exploring a) a News Frame Issues Network that is useful for describing the structure of online news media and b) formulating an influence model for understanding the dynamics of bias that underpins Double Subjectivity. This research has the potential to inform more intelligent conclusions about narrative text meaning (or semantics) to address real-world socio-environmental issues. We use water insecurity in the Southwestern United States as our contextual case. Our experimental evaluation shows the proposed network and model is an effective approach for advancing what we know about the production of language in narrative text where subjectivity exist.

Journalists often localize news stories that are not explicitly about the community they serve by investigating and describing how those stories affect that community. This is, in essence, a form of personalization based not on a reader's personal interests, but rather on their ties to a geographic location. In this paper we present The Local Angle, an approach for automating the process of finding national and international news stories that are locally relevant. The Local Angle associates the people, companies, and organizations mentioned in news stories with geographic locations using semantic analysis tools and online knowledge bases. We describe the design and implementation of our prototype system that helps content curators and consumers discover articles that are of local interest even if they do not originate locally.

As early as 2009, Forceville pointed out that the examination of non-verbal metonymies is more suitable for revealing their inherent power and nuanced, unnoticed effects than the analysis of their verbal counterparts. Although the ubiquity of (verbal) metonymy logically implies the frequent occurrence of nonverbal manifestations, visual metonymies have so far been pushed into the background behind verbal counterparts (Benczes, 2019). This does not mean that there is no discourse on visual metonymies at all, in fact this discourse is becoming more and more active. One of the most productive “sites” of visual metonymies is the world of advertising (see Qui, 2013; Pérez-Sobrino, 2016; Kashanizadeh & Forceville, 2020; Chatti, 2022; Hidalgo-Downing & O’Dowd, 2023). Others have identified visual metonymies in children’s books (Guijarro, 2019; Puspitasari, 2022) and in political campaigns (Goehring, Renegar & Puhl, 2017; Benczes, 2019; Tasić & Stamenković, 2022). The puzzle is more about the exact steps along which visual metonymies can be identified, because authors do not offer details about the process and aspects of analysis and identification. The dissertation specifically focuses on the rhetorical function of visual metonymies, namely the fact that they highlight certain features of a given phenomenon, while relegating others to the background. This characteristic makes metonymy an effective framing device. Although the mentioned studies all imply that visual metonymies are effective framing tools, visual metonymic framing has not yet been defined. The thesis reflects on both the theoretical (i.e., lack of definition) and methodological (i.e., lack of analytical framework) shortcoming by examining the potential inherent in visual metonymic framing in the light of the news genre, more specifically, violent news about Africa. To account for the research niche, an analytical framework, examining the substitutions through which violence is depicted in online news via detecting the metonymic relations of the Action ICM and the metonymies of the Complex event ICM, was set up. The model was validated on a sample of 289 units of analysis. The sample, including articles from BBC Africa and CNN Africa in the period 2011-2020, was compiled in a semi-automated manner. First of all, the results revealed that the INITIAL SUBEVENT FOR COMPLEX EVENT and FINAL SUBEVENT FOR COMPLEX EVENT metonymies greatly outweigh the CENTRAL SUBEVENT FOR COMPLEX EVENT metonymy, thus supporting the related hypothesis. Second of all, the obtained results highlight that the AGENT FOR ACTION and PATIENT FOR ACTION metonymic relationships are responsible for more than half of all the metonymic relations detected in the images. Although the proportion of RESULT FOR ACTION and INSTRUMENT FOR ACTION relationships in themselves is not negligible, overall, an anthropocentric result (driven by AGENT FOR ACTION and PATIENT FOR ACTION) emerged. This finding also supports the related hypothesis. Based on the findings, it can be said that the visual representation of violence in online news is a very fertile ground for the analysis of metonymic framing, since the display of violence is limited in several aspects, so news portals are forced to depict the events through substitutions. The analysed sample suggests that the majority of the substitutions strive to humanize the events, giving way to the emotional involvement of the readers (via the HUMAN OVER NON HUMAN principle and the news value of personification and impact). The thesis provides new results in terms of theory and methodology as well. The following points summarize the novelties explored in this research. • Introduction of a novel definition of visual metonymic framing: despite the fact that scholars agree that (visual) frames are often mediated by figurative language types, such as metaphors and metonymies in texts that offer a particular interpretation of events (among others, Burgers, Konijn & Steen, 2016; Charteris-Black, 2004; Catalano & Waugh, 2013; Catalano & Musolff, 2019), no definition has yet been offered as to what we mean by metonymic framing. This niche is even more evident in the literature on visual metonymies. The dissertation reflects on this deficiency by defining both metonymic framing and visual metonymic framing. • Development of a novel model for the visual metonymic framing of violence: although the discourse on visual metonymies is increasingly active, the puzzle is posed by the lack of clearly defined steps along which visual metonymies can be identified in news images. Focusing on violence as a timeless news value, the dissertation advances an analytical framework that lays the foundations for application of the Violence ICM (motivated by the Action ICM and Complex event ICM). • Identification of a novel metaphor-metonymy interaction in news images: the metaphor-metonymy interaction has so far been primarily investigated in advertisements, at least as far as the visual or multimodal scene is concerned (Pérez Sobrino, 2016; Kashanizadeh & Forceville, 2020). Although not the focus of the thesis, the identification and discussion of metaphor-metonymy interaction in the light of news images is a novel result. I trust that the method can be suitable for examining the visual representation of any violent act, given that the analytical framework is specific enough to identify the Violence ICM, but at the same time flexible enough to be extended to the interpretation of visual representations of violence universally. It is particularly important in the present day to examine through which interpretive frameworks the media portrays violent events, such as wars. Thus, the presented model, allowing for the investigation of the narratives (and their implications) that are prioritized by visual substitutions in online news, is highly relevant and novel. After all, violence, conflict and negative events have always been considered newsworthy, they have always represented news values, and this will certainly remain so in the future as well.

This study examines the framing of Arab refugees and asylum seekers in the global news, represented by the news stories published on the online edition of CNN. Based on the framing theory, the quantitative content analysis found the attribution of responsibility frame to be the most salient and frequent frame in the coverage of Arab refugees and asylum seekers. The responsibility frame ascribing the Arab refugee crisis or its resolution to different actors and groups surpassed the other four news frames— human interest, conflict, economic consequences, and morality; although the five frames were existent in coverage. The lone hypothesis of the study expecting thematic frames to be more common than episodic frames was found supported. That is, the news coverage of Arab refugees tended to be thematic, as it covered the issue in the broader context, whereas episodic frames that focus on individual accounts and personal stories were less frequent. Security terms that describe Arab refugees as potential threats were found more often than the humanitarian terms that frame them as victims. The study pinpointed the lack of photos and voices of Arab refugees in the news coverage, as 90% of the relevant news articles did not include their quotes, whilst around two-thirds of the news stories did not include any of their images. The featured quotes tend to frame Arab refugees negatively, whereas the embedded photos presented more positive frames, however, the overall framing of Arab refugees and asylum seekers in CNN news stories tended to be generally balanced.

This study analyzes US and South Korean news coverage of the H1N1 pandemic to examine cross-cultural variations in attention cycle patterns, cited sources, and news frames. A content analysis was conducted on 630 articles from US and Korean newspapers during the period of April to October 2009. It found that attention cycle patterns, news frames, and sources varied across the two countries according to professional norms, cultural values, social ideologies, and occurrences of relevant events. While US news coverage showed two phases of waxing and waning attention, Korean news coverage showed five phases. The frames used in US news stories placed more emphasis on attribution of responsibility, action, and reassurance. Other framing variations were found as news attention in each country rose and fell. Regarding sources used, Korean news stories relied more on governmental sources, while US news stories used a greater diversity of sources. This study advances research on variations in the attention cycle for transnational issues by specifying how journalists’ framing of social problems can differ according to the following: cultural factors, the shape of the news attention cycle, and the occurrence of events related to the issue at hand.

Framing Arab Refugees in Global News

News being factual and trustworthy is one of the most reliable information. Facts must be interpreted carefully to influence or inform readers rightly and not be victimized by false information. With the presence of COVID 19 pandemic, online news has extended the reach of news making it accessible to many users. Certainly, online news becomes an important news source for many people specifically those who are not fully engaged in watching television. However, with this greater reach comes greater responsibility to report fair and truthful information since it penetrates in the marketplace of ideas. This study used qualitative approach through content analysis to analyze the online news stories. It analyzed news stories posted by the top three online news websites of GMANews.com, ABSCBNnews.com and inquirer.net for three months. Findings show that GMA News, ABS-CBN News Online and inquirer, net news stories are presidential candidates programs and platforms, campaign activities, accomplishments of presidential candidates, poll survey results and trending interviews of candidates. It also discovered that posting news stories not only inform target audience but also educate, spread awareness, and invite formation of opinion. It also divulged that these three sources deliver credible information and practice fair reportage. An action plan is proposed to help voters be oriented and knowledgeable on newsworthiness and news credibility.

A growing number of legacy news organizations are experimenting with ways to address the widespread perception that news is too negative. While many of these initiatives claim to apply traditional news values with a solutions-oriented twist, this study explores one that makes no such claims: the BBC’s The Happy Pod. Using a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of one year of Happy Pod episodes, we analyze the topics and news values the podcast applies and discuss normative democratic implications of this happy-news-only initiative. We find that it is almost the inverse of a traditional news program, covering primarily soft news stories and applying few traditional hard news values (suggesting that some traditional news topics and values are more straightforwardly compatible with happy news). Instead, it applies a host of humanistic news values often downplayed in mainstream news. We conclude that, as a sole source of information, The Happy Pod falls short of democratic ideals, but in other ways, particularly in taking seriously the affective aspects of the news experience and including common citizens, it surpasses most traditional news sources.

The present study aimed at comparing the news values constructed to enhance newsworthiness in English and Arabic science news stories. The study was based on two corpora of science news stories headlines and leads taken from the British Daily Telegraph and the Egyptian Al-Ahram. Each corpus comprised 120 texts. The rhetorical significance of the opening section (headline and lead) of the news story, especially in terms of establishing newsworthiness, has been consistently emphasized in the literature on news discourse. The study employed the discursive news values analysis (DNVA) approach as presented in Bednarek and Caple (2017). The findings of the analysis have indicated that newsworthiness in science news stories is established largely by means of the discursive construction of the following news values: Eliteness, Impact, Negativity, Newness, Positivity, Proximity, Superlativeness , and Unexpectedness. The analysis has shown similarities as well as variation in the relative frequency of news values and the linguistic resources used in their construction. The examined texts have also demonstrated that the combining of two or more than two of the news values is a predominant feature of the headline and lead section of the science news story in the two languages. Positivity and Negativity, in particular, have appeared inseparably related to other values. The identified variations in the two corpora have been explained in terms of the overarching concern of each group of journalists in their science coverage.

Clicks and Editorial Decisions: How Does Popularity Shape Online News Coverage?

This study represents an investigation of the effect of political advertising on readers' perceptions of bias, value, and credibility in an online news article. Participants read an unbiased news article placed alongside three advertisements. Participants randomly entered one of three conditions—right-leaning advertisements, left-leaning advertisements, or neutral advertisements. They then answered questions about the perceived bias and credibility of the article. The researchers predicted biased political ads would prime perceptions of bias for the news article, despite its neutrality. Though the findings trended in the hypothesized direction, a lack of significance suggests political advertising may not serve as a prime for news readers in making decisions about the political bias, credibility, and news value of an article or news source. However, participants who had a higher prior knowledge of politics did place a higher news value on the article than those with low prior knowledge. Also, men were more likely to see a liberal bias and to rate a news story higher on news value.

The criteria on which journalists and news editors judge about newsworthiness of an event or news story are called “news values”. The most prominent and widely studied list of news values (also called news criteria or news factors) was proposed by Galtung and Ruge in 1965 in which twelve selection criteria such as frequency, threshold, unambiguity and meaningfulness were pinned down as the factors by which gatekeepers make decision about newsworthiness of a news item. This leading and seminal article rose many positive and negative reactions and for decades Galtung and Ruge’s list of news values has been reviewed, revisited and criticized by many linguists and media experts. In this article we review the application of this set of news values in Iranian media atmosphere to observe which news values play the major role in selection process of newspapers in this middle east country. The data of this research are composed of 100 news stories gathered from four international morning newspapers published in Iran in winter 2010 and we try to distinguish the news values of Iranian newspapers based on Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) list of news factors. The results of this study show that while reference to elite people (especially politicians) is the most important and frequent news value, some criteria which are not mentioned in Galtung and Rge’s list of news values have a considerable role in news selection process of newspapers in Iran. The most considerable factor for which there is no room in Galtung’s list is the impact of ideology and its role in overall news selection process. This study also shows that although the twelve factors of Galtung and Rug’s list are influential in Iran media, we should not limit selection process to them and the role of social metalingual elements such as ideology and competition with other media in the gatekeeping process should not be ignored.