News Without Sensationalism
Over the last few years, news organizations have gone through a lot of changes. Content aggregators like Facebook, Apple, and Google have been pushing their own native platform experiences for consuming news. Tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Marc Benioff purchased The Washington Post and Time Magazine respectively. The result of these changes has been increased competition for eyes and clicks resulting in more sensational articles. These types of articles have two results: First, sensational articles make it difficult to find actual news content in the article. Second, instead of doing research on article content, people become catalyzed and blindly send articles attempting to gain support or aggravate others based on the article title and content.
For those unfamiliar with the word sensational, lets look at the definition
sen·sa·tion·al /senˈsāSH(ə)n(ə)l/ — (of an account or a publication) presenting information in a way that is intended to provoke public interest and excitement, at the expense of accuracy.
The “expense of accuracy” part of that definition got me thinking: Is there is a way to remove the sensationalism from news articles? This question sent me on a three week journey to my current MVP — https://desational.com. The site uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to identify and remove sensational content and just leave news. This is a work in progress and I’m actively training the algorithm but I’ve started to see a glimmer of more cohesive news reporting.
If you’re an avid news reader, check out https://desational.com and send any feedback to contact@desational.com.
