Quantifying and comparing web news portals’ article salience using the VoxPopuli tool

Abstract

[EN] VoxPopuli tool enables quantification of absolute and relative salience of news articles published on daily news web portals. Obtained numerical values for the two types of salience enable direct comparison of audience impact of different news articles in specified time period. Absolute salience of a news article in a specified time period is determined as the total number of distinct readers who commented on the story in that period. Hence, articlesthat appear on web portals with larger audiences will in general be (absolutely) more salient as there are more potential commentators to comment on them. On the other hand, relative salience of a particular article during a particular time period is calculated as the quotient of a number of distinct readers who comented on that particular story and the number of all readers who in the same period commented on any news story published on the same news portal. As such relative salience will always be a number between 0 and 1, irrespective of the popularity of particular news portal, the (relative) salience of news stories on different news portals can be compared.