breaking the news: first impressions matter on online news julio reis, fabrício benevenuto, pedro...
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Breaking the News: First Impressions Matter on Online News
Julio Reis, Fabrício Benevenuto, Pedro Vaz de Melo, Raquel PratesFederal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil
Haewoon Kwak and Jisun AnQatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
Online news industry is very competitive Many news sites Lots of news articles are written every day
News sites need to create effective strategies to catch people’s attention Headlines (the first impressions) are key Sometimes headlines can be aggressive, exaggerated, and even misleading
Online News
Our goal is to provide a measurement study that explains part of what drives the news production and consumption.
Research Questions How is the sentiment of the news produced by popular newspapers?
Do extremely negative or positive news are able to attract more clicks?
How are users reactions to news articles with different sentiments associated to them?
Goals and Research Questions
Gathering News
Inferring News Popularity
Measuring News Sentiments
Methodology
Gathering News
Inferring News Popularity
Measuring News Sentiments
Methodology
Total of 70K News
Gathered daily news for 8 months from 4 online news sites
Gathering News
Inferring News Popularity
Measuring News Sentiments
Methodology
We used Bit.ly Gathered statistics 20 days later
the news was posted E.g. bit.ly/1cXzn9o
Gathering News
Inferring News Popularity
Measuring News Sentiments
Methodology
Focus on Headlines Infer sentiment from sentence-level
techniques
Which method to use? Results vary widely with the data [COSN’13] We do not know which method is better for
this dataset
Gathering News
Inferring News Popularity
Measuring News Sentiments
Methodology
www.ifeel.dcc.ufmg.br [WWW’14] Implements 20 methods We labeled 100 headlines to test which
method would be suitable
We choose SentiStrength Among the best for our dataset Gives sentiment scores from -5 to 5
How is the sentiment of online news?
There are much more negative
news!
How is the sentiment of online news?
DailymailThe New York Times
Even across categories, there are much more negative than positive news
Do positive or negative news attract more clicks?
Neutral headlines tend to be less popular
Sentiment of Comments
About 75% of the comments are negative, even across categories and
for positive and neutral news
This paper investigate patterns of news creation and consumption Gathered 70 thousands news from NYT, BBC, Reuters, and Dailymail Inferred: Category, Popularity, Sentiment
Key findings: Predominance of negative news Neutral headlines are less popular
Implications for ranking and predictive systems Comments are negative
Even across categories Even positive news attract mostly negative comments
Conclusion
Datasets are available for research purposeswww.dcc.ufmg.br/~fabricio
Thank you!