Sentiment Analysis for News Monitoring

Are you looking to manage your brand reputation online? News monitoring is the process of extracting references to your brand from mainstream media. News sentiment analysis takes those mentions and scores them for positive or negative sentiment. This allows you to understand how the public feels about your company.

These insights can be applied to improve your brand’s competitive advantage and market share. If you want your company to prosper, you must look for brand insights in those channels where people are expressing their feelings toward it. News coverage is one of those channels.

Online brand mentions in the news can influence consumers to believe whether you are worthy of their attention or purchase. Online reputation is the cornerstone of brand trust. It can either elevate a brand or sink it if your credibility is poor. That’s why having a news monitoring tool is so important.

In this blog, we discuss the various aspects of news monitoring and how Repustate’s solution can assist you.

What is news monitoring?

News is the retelling of recent important events, issues, or influential people. This relevant information can include business stories that mention companies, brands, and cultural trends. News stories can cover topics like crime, economics, politics, and entertainment. News can be broadcast through a variety of channels using various media. Thijs Woltering, Manager of Media Analysis at Media Info Groep in the Netherlands, defines news monitoring as “the monitoring of at least all editorial news in the entire media landscape.”

In addition to brand mentions, news monitoring can also be applied to extract references to:

• Competing brands and companies

• Geo-political issues that impact the economy

• Important new political policies and legislation

• Mentions of executives and board members

News monitoring can track a variety of media such as:

• Broadcast TV & Radio (CNN, MSNBC, etc.)

• Online News (Washington Post, New York Times, Huffington Post, etc.)

• Review Sites (Trust Pilot, Verify, Google My Business, etc)

• Business Publications (Forbes, Bloomberg, Business Insider, etc)

• Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc.)

• PR Websites (Cision, CNW, BusinessWire, etc.)

• Podcasts (PBS NewsHour, etc)

Companies from various industries, from consumer packaged goods to automakers, use news sentiment analysis to track their online reputations with social media listening.

Woltering explains “We monitor the news for any organization interested in monitoring a particular topic in the media. This ranges from business and government institutions to charities and celebrities. But also other media monitoring companies and parties in the PR- and marketing and communications world. In a nutshell: for every organization or person who has a media position or is interested in monitoring a specific subject that has a media position.”

Media monitoring aims to get a pulse on your online brand reputation, or to what degree consumers find your company to be trustworthy or credible. This can have an immense impact on your success in the marketplace.

What is news sentiment analysis?

News sentiment analysis takes the basic principles of sentiment analysis and applies them to brand mentions in the news. Sentiment analysis pairs machine learning with natural language processing for text analytics to score high-value information from news coverage and gauges the opinions expressed as negative, positive, or neutral. Sentiment analysis can also be applied to videos from news websites and YouTube through video content analysis.

Online reputation suggests the perspectives consumers have about your brand as expressed through online channels.

Your brand is ultimately how people perceive your company, whether in a positive or negative light. Various groups can express their opinion about your company in the news. Various individuals who are influential on public opinion can speak about your business in the media. People such as:

1. Consumers

2. Company executives

3. Journalists

4. Analysts

5. Influencers

These individuals can all have an immense effect on whether consumers choose to buy from you or do business with you. This is why applying sentiment analysis to news monitoring is so essential. Here is an example news sentiment analysis of how a Subway Sandwiches online brand reputation was recently affected by Irish legislation.

Checkout the list of top News monitoring tools.

How do you scrape news data from the internet using Python?

Many companies employ web scraping for news monitoring. Web scraping is a technique used to browse the internet to search for a piece of particular information. A web scraping tool makes copies of the entire content of a website, copies its data, and then runs a code through it to parse the data and extract the parts you want. Some websites allow web scraping, while others are less inviting, as web scraping can lead to an unprecedented spike in web traffic resulting in a website crash.

Python is used for web scraping not only because it is easy to use, but also because it is perfect for collating information from a huge amount of data. The most widely used modules in the Python library for web scraping are Selenium, Beautiful Soup, and Requests. They can be used individually, as well as together.

Selenium can automate different events like clicking and scrolling on the targeted website and is mostly used for website testing. It is especially helpful if you need to interact with JavaScript.

Beautiful Soup parses the HTML or XML contents of a website and converts them into readable formats, allowing you to search for different elements and retrieve information faster.

Requests allows you to access website HTML contents by sending HTTP requests to get the contents you are looking for.

Learn more about Repustate’s News Sentiment Analysis API

What are the benefits of news monitoring?

There are multiple benefits to news monitoring. The ultimate benefit, though, is to better understand your business environment to drive your competitive edge, operational efficiencies, and sales. With news monitoring you can:

• Locate timely mentions of your brand across various media
• Know what consumers and the press are saying about your company
• Respond and manage your brand reputation in a timely way
• Automate a laborious and time-consuming task
• Understand your competition and how you stack up
• Track and monitor brand ambassadors
• Identify issues and trends before they impact your business
• Organize your brand mentions by theme, topic, and entity
• Improve your business by identifying areas of improvements
• Have sentiment analysis tell you what the overall public opinion is about you

Learn more about News Monitoring Service.

Why choose Repustate’s Text Analytics API for news monitoring?

There are multiple news monitoring platforms such as Cision, TVEyes, and News Exposure. Yet, Repustate’s Text Analytics API provides features and benefits that differentiate it from the rest:

• Multilingual: Provides the ability to perform news monitoring in 23 languages from Arabic to Vietnamese. No translations, only natural language rules

• Innovation: Applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to make media monitoring faster, more accurate, and easier to scale

• Sentiment analysis: Scores brand mentions semantically as being either positive, negative, or neutral

• Social listening: Involves monitoring of social media including Twitter

• Broadcast monitoring: Allows for monitoring of broadcast TV and radio coverage, with easy video search and discovery of clips

• Online tracking: Offers a robust tracking of online news across various websites

• Review analysis: Identifies and extracts consumer opinions from online reviews

• Named Entity Recognition: Uses semantic search to identify and extract important people, places, and things

• Multimedia: Monitoring capabilities across various mediums such as text, audio, and video

• Measurement: Includes a detailed analytics and reporting dashboard for easy to review insights