Bringing Newsworthiness into the 21st Century

Due to the ever increasing flow of (digital) information in today’s society, journalists struggle to manage and assess this abundance of data in terms of their newsworthiness. Although theoretical analyses and mechanisms exist to determine if something is worth publishing, applying these techniques requires substantial domain knowledge and know-how. Furthermore, the consumer’s need for near-immediate reporting significantly limits the time for journalists to select and produce content. In this paper, we propose an approach to automate the process of newsworthiness assessment, by applying recent Semantic Web technologies to verify theoretically determined news criteria. We implemented a proof-of-concept application that generates a newsworthiness profile for a user-specified news item. A preliminary evaluation by manual verification was performed, resulting in 83.93% precision and 66.07% recall. However, further evaluation by domain experts is needed. To conclude, we outline the possible implications of our approach on both the technical and journalistic domains.