Join The Dots: News Portals Must Make the Audience The Headline

What is the news if its not a barometer of the day’s zeitgeist? But do online news service bother to understand the emotions or feelings of readers and report that back as a measure of community happiness, dissatisfaction, alienation or anger? No.

In fact how do most news portals demonstrate the priorities and preference of readers? By weighting the top stories by clicks or views. Unfortunately, this type of content optimisation is a rather superficial representation of actual engagement with the news of the day, failing to adequately respond, for example, to the emotion of one story amongst a small but passionate audience sub-set.

While the best news organisations maintain a degree of objectivity, wedded to the notion of ‘just the facts’, giving all competing sides an opportunity to vent an opinion in the context of those facts, there is a very real opportunity for these organisations to tap into the associated emotion stirred up amongst readers.

In short, digital news groups need to keep playing it straight, but give audience feedback and commentary a much higher level of exposure, dare I say it visualisation. In other words, to go beyond the boring threads and give real insight into the audience’s passion, anger, delight and shock.

Above is a representation of ‘feelings’ which dominate Australian blogs this past year. The scraping and applet technology developed by the We Feel Fine group, is an example of what digital news groups should be doing to give their online channels real dynamism in the pursuit of mixing fact with audience response.

To date, audience feedback is a neglected resource, crying out for a data analysis and mining strategy that will contribute real value to online news services by way of audience recognition. This in turn will have a significant impact on frequency, retention, engagement, and for the first mover, a very positive brand impact.

Importantly for a news service, there is real value is developing a longitudinal position on these type of data sets, giving the organisation an ability to ‘map’ changing moods across economic, political or social events or cycles. In the following example, the top five most used emotional terms during 2007 (first box) are compared to similar terms for 2008 (second box).

These broad, sweeping aggregates of what online commentators are feeling have their place, but using the same technology to evaluate reponses on particular issues, events or even personalities over a 24-hour news cycle would have a measurable impact on an online news service and its ability to capture the essence of community sentiment.

The identification and utilisation of such crowd-psychology should a cornerstone of a modern news gathering organisation.