What Can Data Analytics Reveal About Your News Consumption?

Daily Positive (D+) is a not-for-profit media initiative to accumulate, store and publish positive news from all the countries of the world. While working towards promoting positivity from around the world, we also conduct many in house research based on data analytics. The followings are three outcomes that we have recently discovered regarding your news consumption practice:

10 to 12 - is the number of days that a news makes it to the front page

Whether the news is about a recent terrorist attack or a noble peace prize winner, none makes it to the front page of any major newspaper, after 10 to 12 days. This is what we have found based on our observation of front-page news of 20+ major newspapers from around the world for last 3 years.

There are many reasons for that, including some that we possibly did not discover in our research. But it is mainly because of the business model of the news publishers. As news publishers if you apparently failed to produce fresh and diverse contents in regular basis, you will lose readers. This constant pressure on the news publishers often forces them to diversify their front-page news feeds. It is completely fair for a news agency to adopt a model to attract more readers.

Having said that, I should also highlight, the news does no disappear only because of the news publishers. It happens also because readers tend to lose interest in a news item within that 10 to 12 days period.  

We would like you to test it and let us know.

20-25 - is the number of words that you remember after reading a news article

Have you ever thought that all these years you read newspapers, most likely to get information about current affairs. You were not reading newspapers to memorize the content of a particular news article. This is certainly concerning for the future survival of full-length news articles. Specially as people are getting busier and demanding information quicker on their topic of interest.  

I am not advocating complete demise of full- length news articles, but highlighting the necessity for news publishers to think radically about their future business model. Specially, when our research suggests people remember only about 20-25 words from a news article after 24 hours.  

Can you put it to test and see how many words you remember after 24 hours of reading a news article? Don’t forget to share your number with us and don’t force yourself to remember more or less.

Which news spread faster, Positive or Negative?

While the news publishers are often criticised for their over emphasis on negative news, have you ever thought what kind of news, positive or negative, are you likely to share with others?  In case you do not have the actual statistic on your personal record, you are not alone.

First and foremost, it is hard to identify or quantify the rate of positive or negative news spread in the offline world. Thus, any news trend analysis research is generally limited to online or social media world, which does not represent the entire population. This is one of the major reasons why we found it hard to have a definitive answer to the above question.

But our research had a solid conclusion about why people tend to spread a news. Contrary to the popular belief that people spread a news either out of passion or hate, we found it is the exposure to a news make people share the most. In other word, there is a strong correlation between the first finding of this article i.e. the number of days that a news makes headline and the possibility of you sharing a news.

We found it very hard to draw a definitive conclusion without further research, but we are keen to know which news will you share the most?

We may publish further details on the above research in the coming days based on community interest and internal priorities. This post is a conversation starter and happy to collaborate and engage in further research activities in this space.