Produção e consumo de notícias online: caracterização e implicações para a construção de sistemas

Abstract

A growing number of people are changing the way they consume news, replacing the traditional physical newspapers and magazines by their virtual online versions or/and weblogs. The interactivity and immediacy present in online news are changing the way news are being produced and exposed by media corporations. News websites have to create effective strategies to catch people's attention and attract their clicks. Considering this, in this work we investigate possible strategies used by online news corporations in the design of their news headlines. Specifically, aspects of production and consumption of online news. We analyze the content of 69,907 headlines produced by four major global media corporations (BBC News, Dailymail, The New York Times and Reuters) during a minimum of eight consecutive months of 2014. In order to discover strategies that could be used to attract clicks, we extracted features from the text of the news headlines related to the sentiment polarity of the headline. Moreover, we analyze qualitatively the impact of this polarity expressed in headlines in the reading habits of users. To do so, we developed the Magnet News, an online tool that allows users to select the polarity of the content they want to read. Our results show interesting observations that can be used in the design of online news systems that support users in this context.