How To Strengthen News Sentiment Analysis With Web Scraping

We live in a world where we are constantly inundated with news alerts and updates all day. When the news feels exhausting on a daily basis, it can be hard to tell what stories are effective in communicating the varying feelings of the public. With news sentiment analysis, you’re able to analyze any given story for positive or negative reaction, while also studying the impact these same stories have on the feelings of readers. This analysis informs your understanding of trends in media, gauges consumer sentiment, and helps writers avoid repeating the same story. However, this data can be limited without the proper context. Web scraping helps you reveal insights and uncover information that provides additional context including reader reactions, online success of a story, and overall trends in media.

If you know the basics of news sentiment analysis, use the table of contents to discover how web scraping enhances your data.

Table of Contents

What Is Sentiment Analysis Of News Articles?

Sentiment analysis of news articles includes looking at the language in news stories and deciphering the emotions inherent in a given word choice. This helps you get a better overall sense of the national sentiment in regard to politics, culture, events, and more. While many sources will tell you that coding skills are necessary, there are many tools out there to help you to do news sentiment analysis without python or other computer programs.

How To Do Sentiment Analysis Of News Articles

Sentiment analysis requires complicated programs that help distinguish the tone associated with certain word choices. Most coding professionals can develop programs to understand subtle differences in language. For the average person, the process looks a lot different. Journalists can use web scraping to extract data from online sources so they don’t have to create their own programs. This saves time and money while also making publicly available data useful. For everyday people trying to get a better sense of the media landscape, scraping is an easy way to extract data that usually requires fancy coding programs. To get a better sense of how the process works, read our previous blog post about scraping web pages for sentiment analysis.

What You Learn From Sentiment Analysis With News Articles

Analyzing the news can help journalists understand the minds and interests of readers and also help readers understand their peers’ feelings. Below are more ways that news article sentiment analysis helps you understand trends in media and become a better journalist.

Discover trends in media

New topics change drastically from week to week. With all the rapidly developing news, it is crucial to stay as updated as possible. While the same issues might be covered (healthcare, elections, sports, etc), the attitudes of journalists and the media change over time. By performing sentiment analysis you can determine whether the language is more positive now when describing universal healthcare, for example, or how increasingly drastic the language in articles related to climate change gets over time. Once you understand these shifts in tone, you can begin to see trends in media and make better decisions about the future. If you are a writer, this helps you anticipate stories or opinion pieces before other writers. For readers, this helps you get a better sense of the world around you when you personally only have time to deeply read a few different sources. You can glean the sentiment from across the media without reading every article out there.

Understand consumer sentiment

As mentioned before, it can be hard to gauge audience interest in a story. By analyzing the sentiment of the most popular stories, you can see what emotions readers are gravitating toward. This is helpful within many industries. If you are a storyteller of any kind, you can see what topics are present in the national psyche. If you are running a political campaign, audience reactions to news stories can give insight into possible policy solutions to propose. For artists, analyzing reviews of their work can help them see critical consensus. For journalists, you can discover the responses to different types of stories, which helps you make better editorial decisions in the future.

Avoid story repetition

One of the biggest battles of working in news is being the first to break a story or to have a unique take on a national issue. For journalists and editors, tracking news sentiment and trends in the media helps them understand what stories aren’t getting enough attention and which stories are covered too much already. Using your voice in the right way at the right time is crucial to success in journalism and being aware of the industry at large helps journalists avoid repeating stories or opinions, making them more likely to create original articles. In addition to news sentiment analysis, there are many ways to incorporate data throughout the process of writing a story. Here is a previous blog post about data driven journalism.

How To Incorporate Web Scraping Into News Sentiment Analysis

Web scraping is the automated process of extracting information from web pages and downloading it into a shareable format. Below are ways that web scraping can help you decide how to do sentiment analysis on news in the most original and impactful way.

Create custom scraping solution

Typical scraping modules are useful but limited. For larger news corporations or freelance journalists working with many different publications, it can be hard to track all your data within one module or process. When you work with the Scraping Robot team to create a custom scraping solution, then you can scrape by the millions or billions, paying less per scrape than with limited modules. In addition, using a custom scraping solution built by Scraping Robot guarantees that you follow the security laws that differ from one news outlet to another. If this sounds like a good fit for you or your business, contact us to get started.

Learn from comments on articles

In addition to the pieces themselves, the online comment section is another treasure trove of data in our online world. For example, if a piece tends towards negative language but all the comments are positive, then performing analysis on just the article alone does not provide you with the full, accurate picture. By scraping online comments, journalists and readers can get a sense of public opinion without having to conduct outside research polls that require hiring extra staff and subjects. Also, comparing the number of comments on different pieces can help you learn what kinds of stories create conversation from readers and which simply go by unnoticed.

Track story success on social media

Similar to tracking comments, tracking the views or shares of a story on social media can add to sentiment analysis by again helping you determine what kinds of stories are the most popular among social media users. Looking at different social media sites also helps you compare success on each site which can help you decide which platforms to focus the most time on. For writers, it is important to scrape the number of shares or mentions an article gets. This can help you get a better sense of your readership and their interests based on which stories are the most popular or widely discussed. If you want to track the number of conversions for a product linked in an article, here’s a guide to conversion tracking.

Discover keywords

A great web scraping technique is to scrape the most popular results for a given keyword. For example, the term ‘healthcare’ alone does not have a feeling attached to it. However, if you scrape the news search results for ‘healthcare,’ then you can see in what light, good or bad, the topic is discussed on popular websites or news outlets. Scraping search results is also an easy way for businesses or individuals to conduct basic research about the most popular stories for a given topic around specific issues like health care or social equity.

Conclusion

Living through such a monumental moment in history, it can be easy to find the news overwhelming and vast. For journalists, it can be extra difficult to get a sense of your peers’ work due to the sheer mass amount of articles available online. By practicing news sentiment analysis, you can begin to decode the emotions present in even the most neutral of news sources. This process informs you of overall news trends, national attitudes regarding a given topic, and the popularity of a certain story or sentiment. While this is all useful, adding web scraping strategies to your sentiment analysis techniques can help you also analyze the impact a given article has on social media, the comments section, or even compared to a journalist’s previous work.

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Hannah Benson