AudienceView: AI-Assisted Interpretation of Audience Feedback in Journalism
This addresses a workflow challenge for journalists by providing a practical tool to manage feedback, though it is incremental as it applies existing LLM technology to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of journalists struggling with large volumes of online audience feedback by introducing AudienceView, an AI-assisted tool that categorizes and interprets comments, resulting in features like theme identification, sentiment visualization, and reporting idea generation.
Understanding and making use of audience feedback is important but difficult for journalists, who now face an impractically large volume of audience comments online. We introduce AudienceView, an online tool to help journalists categorize and interpret this feedback by leveraging large language models (LLMs). AudienceView identifies themes and topics, connects them back to specific comments, provides ways to visualize the sentiment and distribution of the comments, and helps users develop ideas for subsequent reporting projects. We consider how such tools can be useful in a journalist's workflow, and emphasize the importance of contextual awareness and human judgment.