AudienceView: AI-Assisted Interpretation of Audience Feedback in Journalism

TL;DR

AudienceView is an AI-powered tool that helps journalists analyze large volumes of online audience comments by categorizing themes, visualizing sentiment, and supporting report development, thereby enhancing journalistic workflow.

Contribution

The paper introduces AudienceView, a novel AI-assisted platform that leverages large language models to interpret and visualize audience feedback for journalists.

Findings

Effective categorization of comments into themes

Visualization of sentiment and comment distribution

Supports journalists in developing reporting ideas

Abstract

Understanding and making use of audience feedback is important but difficult for journalists, who now face an impractically large volume of audience comments online. We introduce AudienceView, an online tool to help journalists categorize and interpret this feedback by leveraging large language models (LLMs). AudienceView identifies themes and topics, connects them back to specific comments, provides ways to visualize the sentiment and distribution of the comments, and helps users develop ideas for subsequent reporting projects. We consider how such tools can be useful in a journalist's workflow, and emphasize the importance of contextual awareness and human judgment.