Prototype

No Hype News!

What if…

I could read my news without being swamped by stories that are hyped right now?

Problem

Of course, major news are important and so every media outlet is covering those stories at the same time. As a result the consumer might get the same information delivered from all sides and at the same time can’t find news about other topics which might be interesting for him.

Solution

The NoHypeNews-News-Aggregator is collecting all news stories from the country’s major publishers and automatically scans for similarities in the covered topics. The top 3 topics, which are touched most throughout all publications, will be marked as “hype“ so that the reader can filter them away and browse through everything else that has happened in the news.

Challenges

The biggest challenge in this endeavor was to define what a “topic“ actually is so that we can design a classifier for that. The Covid-19 pandemic is a pretty obvious topic that dominates the news on many days with covering of over 60% of all stories. Apart from that the system identified topics like general national league sports, countries like Germany and USA or politicians like Angela Merkel or Donald Trump as hyping topics. The question is if they should be considered to be individual topics by themselves or if they are just mentioned frequently because they are involved in several different topics at the same time. For this challenge we did not find an automated mechanism yet and had to fall back to blacklist and similarity-configurations.

Visit the prototype here: No Hype News