365 Dots in 2019: Quantifying Attention of News Sources

TL;DR

This paper introduces StoryGraph, a platform that quantifies and visualizes the attention given to news stories across various media sources in near-real time, enabling analysis of news focus and trends.

Contribution

We present a novel system, StoryGraph, that extracts, represents, and scores news stories based on entity overlap and similarity, providing real-time attention metrics across diverse news outlets.

Findings

Identified top news stories of 2018 and 2019 with attention scores.

Demonstrated the platform's ability to track news attention over time.

Showcased the potential for analyzing news media focus and trends.

Abstract

We investigate the overlap of topics of online news articles from a variety of sources. To do this, we provide a platform for studying the news by measuring this overlap and scoring news stories according to the degree of attention in near-real time. This can enable multiple studies, including identifying topics that receive the most attention from news organizations and identifying slow news days versus major news days. Our application, StoryGraph, periodically (10-minute intervals) extracts the first five news articles from the RSS feeds of 17 US news media organizations across the partisanship spectrum (left, center, and right). From these articles, StoryGraph extracts named entities (PEOPLE, LOCATIONS, ORGANIZATIONS, etc.) and then represents each news article with its set of extracted named entities. Finally, StoryGraph generates a news similarity graph where the nodes represent news articles, and an edge between a pair of nodes represents a high degree of similarity between the nodes (similar news stories). Each news story within the news similarity graph is assigned an attention score which quantifies the amount of attention the topics in the news story receive collectively from the news media organizations. The StoryGraph service has been running since August 2017, and using this method, we determined that the top news story of 2018 was the "Kavanaugh hearings" with attention score of 25.85 on September 27, 2018. Similarly, the top news story for 2019 so far (2019-12-12) is "AG William Barr's release of his principal conclusions of the Mueller Report," with an attention score of 22.93 on March 24, 2019.