Intro
I downloaded all Spiegel Online articles that were published between 05/05 - 06/05/21 and ran a sentiment analysis on them. In total there are 3.585 articles for this month, including Spiegel Plus and deleted articles.
Articles per Category
About half of all articles were published under the categories Panorama, Ausland and Politik.
Articles per day
There seems to be a repeating pattern for the amount of articles that get published each day of the week. During the week appear more new articles than on weekends and the peak is around Friday. On May 13th a lot less articles than expected were published, which is most likely due to it being a national holiday (Christi Himmelfahrt/Männertag).
Sentiment per Category
I wrote an AI that assigned each word in every category a sentiment score between -1 and 1. The mean of all individual scores per word resulted in a score for each article. This article score is an indicator for the overall positivity/negativity of an article.
- -1 very negative
- 0 neutral
- 1 very positive
The following graphic shows the sum of sentiments per category. An article with 0.5 Sentiment, and another one with -0.5 Sentiment would even each other out to 0. An article with 0.2 and one with -0.4 would result in -0.2.
Panorama and Ausland are the only categories with negative sentiment. Sport articles are very positive and all other categories are overall positive. Interestingly Wirtschaft and Sport have roughly the same amount of articles, but the Sentiment rating of Sport is about 4 times more positive than Wirtschaft
The graphic below displays the mean sentiment per category as a box plot. The least positive Article in Tests has a sentiment score of 0.32, which is still in the top 26% of most positive rated articles.
