By Joyce Yanru Jiang & Anne Whitehead
Uganda – like the rest of the world – has experienced a large volume of news coverage about the Covid-19 pandemic. Whitehead Communications used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyse the dominant topics that emerged within Covid-19 coverage by online news websites in Uganda. We gathered more than 13,000 news articles that included the terms “covid” or “corona” from 13 English language news websites. This analysis included the websites of Uganda’s major print publications Daily Monitor, New Vision, and Red Pepper as well as major online-only Ugandan media houses Chimp Reports, Nile Post, PML Daily, Observer and The Independent (the last two of which became online-only just recently during the pandemic lockdown), and other online-only news publishers including Softpower, The Tower Post, Eagle News, Trumpet News and The Brink News.
This was exploratory and experimental research to find out which topics stood out in Ugandan media coverage of Covid-19 according to a machine learning method called LDA Topic Modelling, which employs a Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique. This methodology alone cannot be considered comprehensive or conclusive, but it offers an initial indication and useful insights into how the subject was covered in the Ugandan press.
Figure 1 below shows of the volume of articles that we collected from each news website. This only represents the online written news media landscape in Uganda, but presents us with an initial sample for further analysis.
Figure 1 - Total # of articles including "covid" or "corona" by media house
OUR PURPOSE
This research aims to explore how Covid-19 has been covered by Ugandan online news websites within the first six months of 2020 using machine learning. We identified top news sites in Uganda that publish in English and applied an LDA Topic Modelling computational technique to discover which topics are being covered related to the coronavirus pandemic. Our research is intended to deliver insights to those who have a special interest in Uganda’s media industry, or the country’s experience with Covid-19, or those interested in the application of machine learning to media and communications research. This is part of a wider research project by Whitehead Communications exploring the application of multiple new research methods to see the bigger picture, draw correlations and build stronger research-based foundations on which to develop communications strategy.
OVERVIEW OF COVID-19 MEDIA COVERAGE IN UGANDA
The weekly number of articles produced by Ugandan online media increased dramatically in mid-March of 2020, as the first Ugandan case was declared on the 21st of March2 and the country went into lockdown in the same week3. Covid-19 related coverage by volume of online articles reached its height in April of 2020, then began to decline. This indicates that media interest in the disease and its impact peaked during the period when lockdown was strictest and cases were just beginning to mount, but before the first Covid-19 death was announced in Uganda on the 23rd of July, 20204. We removed from our dataset any stories republished from foreign media outlets in order to focus only on news produced in Uganda.
According to our dataset, the Daily Monitor published the largest volume of Covid-19 related articles online in April, averaging 150 per week, followed by The Independent (~141/week), then PML Daily (~137/week), Chimp Reports (~114/week), Nile Post (~104/week) and New Vision (~68/week). The volume of articles began to drop again in May. You can see this trend in Figure 2 below.
This research aims to explore how Covid-19 has been covered by Ugandan online news websites within the first six months of 2020 using machine learning. We identified top news sites in Uganda that publish in English and applied an LDA Topic Modelling computational technique to discover which topics are being covered related to the coronavirus pandemic. Our research is intended to deliver insights to those who have a special interest in Uganda’s media industry, or the country’s experience with Covid-19, or those interested in the application of machine learning to media and communications research. This is part of a wider research project by Whitehead Communications exploring the application of multiple new research methods to see the bigger picture, draw correlations and build stronger research-based foundations on which to develop communications strategy.
OVERVIEW OF COVID-19 MEDIA COVERAGE IN UGANDA
The weekly number of articles produced by Ugandan online media increased dramatically in mid-March of 2020, as the first Ugandan case was declared on the 21st of March2 and the country went into lockdown in the same week3. Covid-19 related coverage by volume of online articles reached its height in April of 2020, then began to decline. This indicates that media interest in the disease and its impact peaked during the period when lockdown was strictest and cases were just beginning to mount, but before the first Covid-19 death was announced in Uganda on the 23rd of July, 20204. We removed from our dataset any stories republished from foreign media outlets in order to focus only on news produced in Uganda.
According to our dataset, the Daily Monitor published the largest volume of Covid-19 related articles online in April, averaging 150 per week, followed by The Independent (~141/week), then PML Daily (~137/week), Chimp Reports (~114/week), Nile Post (~104/week) and New Vision (~68/week). The volume of articles began to drop again in May. You can see this trend in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2 - Weekly volume of articles by media house
TOPIC ANALYSIS
Our analysis identified 16 topics that emerged in Ugandan online news media coverage of Covid-19,
as listed below:
1. Cases & testing
2. Healthcare
3. Domestic outbreak (and government enforcement)
4. Parliament budgeting
5. Travel restrictions
6. Global outbreak and international response
7. Contributions to Covid-19 budget
8. Economy & finance
9. Education
10. Courts & justice
11. Sports
12. Culture & religion
13. Electoral politics
14. Police action
15. Editorials & personal stories
16. Presidential directives
These topics were identified through an unsupervised algorithm, which we ran several times using different parameters until we found the most optimal result. We checked the articles it grouped together to identify what the topics were. Some topics were straightforward, as the articles shared common themes, such as # 9 Education and # 11 Sports. Others were made up of mixed subtopics under one major topic, such as # 3, which gathered together stories about the domestic outbreak and how the government was responding. We also chose to combine four automatically generated topics into two, since their topics were very similar: stories about cases and testing were combined into topic # 1, and editorials and personal stories were combined into topic # 15. The algorithm clustered together groups of stories that differed, but shared a common thread, such as those mentioning the courts system (#10), or those related to different types of restrictions on transport and travel (#5).
More details about our methodology, along with a further examination of a few key topics related to Covid-19 and how they manifested in Ugandan news coverage are shared in the full report below.
Download the full report here.
If you wish to collaborate with us on further research, please email [email protected]
If you wish to collaborate with us on further research, please email [email protected]
