The structure of the EU mediasphere

Background. A trend towards automation of scientific research has recently resulted in what has been termed “data-driven inquiry” in various disciplines, including physics and biology. The automation of many tasks has been identified as a possible future also for the humanities and the social sciences, particularly in those disciplines concerned with the analysis of text, due to the recent availability of millions of books and news articles in digital format. In the social sciences, the analysis of news media is done largely by hand and in a hypothesis-driven fashion: the scholar needs to formulate a very specific assumption about the patterns that might be in the data, and then set out to verify if they are present or not. Methodology/Principal Findings. In this study, we report what we think is the first large scale content-analysis of cross-linguistic text in the social sciences, by using various artificial intelligence techniques. We analyse 1.3 M news articles in 22 languages detecting a clear structure in the choice of stories covered by the various outlets. This is significantly affected by objective national, geographic, economic and cultural relations among outlets and countries, e.g., outlets from countries sharing strong economic ties are more likely to cover the same stories. We also show that the deviation from average content is significantly correlated with membership to the eurozone, as well as with the year of accession to the EU. Conclusions/Significance. While independently making a multitude of small editorial decisions, the leading media of the 27 EU countries, over a period of six months, shaped the contents of the EU mediasphere in a way that reflects its deep geographic, economic and cultural relations. Detecting these subtle signals in a statistically rigorous way would be out of the reach of traditional methods. This analysis demonstrates the power of the available methods for significant automation of media content analysis

The Structure of the EU Mediasphere

Background. A trend towards automation of scientific research has recently resulted in what has been termed “data-driven inquiry” in various disciplines, including physics and biology. The automation of many tasks has been identified as a possible future also for the humanities and the social sciences, particularly in those disciplines concerned with the analysis of text, due to the recent availability of millions of books and news articles in digital format. In the social sciences, the analysis of news media is done largely by hand and in a hypothesis-driven fashion: the scholar needs to formulate a very specific assumption about the patterns that might be in the data, and then set out to verify if they are present or not. Methodology/Principal Findings. In this study, we report what we think is the first large scale content-analysis of cross-linguistic text in the social sciences, by using various artificial intelligence techniques. We analyse 1.3 M news articles in 22 languages detecting a clear structure in the choice of stories covered by the various outlets. This is significantly affected by objective national, geographic, economic and cultural relations among outlets and countries, e.g., outlets from countries sharing strong economic ties are more likely to cover the same stories. We also show that the deviation from average content is significantly correlated with membership to the eurozone, as well as with the year of accession to the EU. Conclusions/Significance. While independently making a multitude of small editorial decisions, the leading media of the 27 EU countries, over a period of six months, shaped the contents of the EU mediasphere in a way that reflects its deep geographic, economic and cultural relations. Detecting these subtle signals in a statistically rigorous way would be out of the reach of traditional methods. This analysis demonstrates the power of the available methods for significant automation of media content analysis

Learning the Preferences of News Readers with SVM and Lasso Ranking

Abstract. We attack the task of predicting which news-stories are more appealing to a given audience by comparing 'most popular stories', gathered from various online news outlets, over a period of seven months, with stories that did not become popular despite appearing on the same page at the same time. We cast this as a learning-to-rank task, and train two different learning algorithms to reproduce the preferences of the readers, within each of the outlets. The first method is based on Support Vector Machines, the second on the Lasso. By just using words as features, SVM ranking can reach significant accuracy in correctly predicting the preference of readers for a given pair of articles. Furthermore, by exploiting the sparsity of the solutions found by the Lasso, we can also generate lists of keywords that are expected to trigger the attention of the outlets' readers

Detecting Macro-patterns in the European Mediasphere

The analysis of the contents of news outlets has been the focus of social scientists for a long time. However, content analysis is often performed on hand-coded documents, which limits the size of the data accessible to the investigation and consequently limits the possibility of detecting macro-trends. The use of text categorisation, clustering and statistical machine translation (SMT) enables us to operate automatically on vast amounts of news items, and consequently to analyse patterns in the content of outlets in different languages, over long time periods. We report on experiments involving hundreds of European media in 22 different languages, demonstrating how it is possible to detect similarities and differences between outlets, and between countries, based on the contents of their articles