News Kaleidoscope: Visual Investigation of Coverage Diversity in News Event Reporting

When a newsworthy event occurs, media articles that report on the event can vary widely-a concept known as coverage diversity. To help investigate coverage diversity in event reporting, we develop a visual analytics system called News Kaleidoscope. News Kaleidoscope combines several backend language processing techniques with a coordinated visualization interface. Notably, News Kaleidoscope is tailored for visualization non-experts, and adopts an analytic workflow based around subselection analysis, whereby second-level features of articles are extracted to provide a more detailed and nuanced analysis of coverage diversity. To robustly evaluate News Kaleidoscope, we conduct a trio of user studies. (1) A study with news experts assesses the insights promoted for our targeted journalism-savvy users. (2) A follow-up study with news novices assesses the overall system and the specific insights promoted for journalism-agnostic users. (3) Based on identified system limitations in these two studies, we refine News Kaleidoscope's design and conduct a third study to validate these improvements. Results indicate that, for both news novice and experts, News Kaleidoscope supports an effective, task-driven workflow for analyzing the diversity of news coverage about events, though journalism expertise has a significant influence on the user's insights and takeaways. Our insights developing and evaluating News Kaleidoscope can aid future tools that combine visualization with natural language processing to analyze coverage diversity in news event reporting.

Automated summary

News Kaleidoscope is a visual analytics system designed to investigate coverage diversity in event reporting. By combining backend language processing techniques with a coordinated visualization interface, News Kaleidoscope offers a tailored analytic workflow for non-experts to conduct a detailed and nuanced analysis of news coverage diversity. User studies demonstrate that News Kaleidoscope supports an effective, task-driven workflow for analyzing news coverage diversity for both journalism experts and novices, with journalism expertise influencing the user's insights and takeaways.