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This study explores the affective responses and newsworthiness perceptions of generative AI for visual journalism. While generative AI offers advantages for newsrooms in terms of producing unique images and cutting costs, the potential misuse of AI-generated news images is a cause for concern. For our study, we designed a 3-part news image codebook for affect-labeling news images based on journalism ethics and photography guidelines. We collected 200 news headlines and images retrieved from a variety of U.S. news sources on the topics of gun violence and climate change, generated corresponding news images from DALL-E 2 and asked annotators their emotional responses to the human-selected and AI-generated news images following the codebook. We also examined the impact of modality on emotions by measuring the effects of visual and textual modalities on emotional responses. The findings of this study provide insights into the quality and emotional impact of generative news images produced by humans and AI. Further, results of this work can be useful in developing technical guidelines as well as policy measures for the ethical use of generative AI systems in journalistic production. The codebook, images and annotations are made publicly available to facilitate future research in affective computing, specifically tailored to civic and public-interest journalism. 

We aim to develop methods for understanding how multimedia news exposure can affect people’s emotional responses, and we especially focus on news content related to gun violence, a very important yet polarizing issue in the U.S. We created the dataset NEmo+ by significantly extending the U.S. gun violence news-to-emotions dataset, BU-NEmo, from 320 to 1,297 news headline and lead image pairings and collecting 38,910 annotations in a large crowdsourcing experiment. In curating the NEmo+ dataset, we developed methods to identify news items that will trigger similar versus divergent emotional responses. For news items that trigger similar emotional responses, we compiled them into the NEmo+-Consensus dataset. We benchmark models on this dataset that predict a person’s dominant emotional response toward the target news item (single-label prediction). On the full NEmo+ dataset, containing news items that would lead to both differing and similar emotional responses, we also benchmark models for the novel task of predicting the distribution of evoked emotional responses in humans when presented with multi-modal news content. Our single-label and multi-label prediction models outperform baselines by large margins across several metrics. 

We propose a five-step computational framing analysis framework that researchers can use to analyze multilingual news data. The framework combines unsupervised and supervised machine learning and leverages a state-of-the-art multilingual deep learning model, which can significantly enhance frame prediction performance while requiring a considerably small sample of manual annotations. Most importantly, anyone can perform the proposed computational framing analysis using a free, open-sourced system, created by a team of communication scholars, computer scientists, web designers and web developers. Making advanced computational analysis available to researchers without a programming background to some degree bridges the digital divide within the communication research discipline in particular and the academic community in general. 

When journalists cover a news story, they can cover the story from multiple angles or perspectives. These perspectives are called “frames,” and usage of one frame or another may influence public perception and opinion of the issue at hand. We develop a web-based system for analyzing frames in multilingual text documents. We propose and guide users through a five-step end-to-end computational framing analysis framework grounded in media framing theory in communication research. Users can use the framework to analyze multilingual text data, starting from the exploration of frames in user’s corpora and through review of previous framing literature (step 1-3) to frame classification (step 4) and prediction (step 5). The framework combines unsupervised and supervised machine learning and leverages a state-of-the-art (SoTA) multilingual language model, which can significantly enhance frame prediction performance while requiring a considerably small sample of manual annotations. Through the interactive website, anyone can perform the proposed computational framing analysis, making advanced computational analysis available to researchers without a programming background and bridging the digital divide within the communication research discipline in particular and the academic community in general. The system is available online at http://www.openframing.org, via an API http://www.openframing.org:5000/docs/, or through our GitHub page https://github.com/vibss2397/openFraming.