DIANES: A DEI Audit Toolkit for News Sources

TL;DR

DIANES is a real-time NLP toolkit designed to help news organizations analyze and improve the diversity, equity, and inclusion of their sourcing practices by monitoring quotes and speaker demographics.

Contribution

The paper introduces DIANES, a novel real-time NLP toolkit with plugins and APIs to assist news media in auditing and enhancing DEI in sourcing.

Findings

Real-time extraction of quotes and speaker info from news articles

Tools for monitoring and promoting DEI norms in journalism

Supports on-demand analysis for news organizations

Abstract

Professional news media organizations have always touted the importance that they give to multiple perspectives. However, in practice the traditional approach to all-sides has favored people in the dominant culture. Hence it has come under ethical critique under the new norms of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). When DEI is applied to journalism, it goes beyond conventional notions of impartiality and bias and instead democratizes the journalistic practice of sourcing -- who is quoted or interviewed, who is not, how often, from which demographic group, gender, and so forth. There is currently no real-time or on-demand tool in the hands of reporters to analyze the persons they quote. In this paper, we present DIANES, a DEI Audit Toolkit for News Sources. It consists of a natural language processing pipeline on the backend to extract quotes, speakers, titles, and organizations from news articles in real time. On the frontend, DIANES offers the WordPress plugins, a Web monitor, and a DEI annotation API service, to help news media monitor their own quoting patterns and push themselves towards DEI norms.