Reading the Sentiment Map

The Sentiment Map visualizes how local sources across different regions feel about a topic. Instead of a single aggregate tone score, it shows you where sentiment is positive or negative, revealing geographic patterns that a national average would obscure.

How the Sentiment Map Works

The map is generated from the articles and social media posts collected for your search query. For each region, NewsVibe aggregates the sentiment scores of all sources based there and plots the result as a color on the map.

This means the map reflects how local sources discuss the specific subject of your query.

For understanding the intensity of the overall coverage of the chosen theme (i.e. how many mentions about it come from local sources, and from which region), the Activity Map is more relevant.

How it differs from the Activity Map

While the Sentiment Map indicates the polarity of the discourse (positive, negative, or neutral), the Activity Map exclusively measures the degree of local coverage. The latter uses color intensity to show the percentage of local sources that covered the topic, relative to the total number of monitored sources in that county.

Note: Regardless of the map being viewed, simply hovering the cursor over a county will display the explicit raw data: the exact number of mentions and the percentage of local sources involved.

Reading the Map

Color coding

Each region is color-coded based on the predominant sentiment of local sources covering your topic:

• Green (positive): local sources covering this topic lean favorable in tone.
• Red (negative): local sources covering this topic lean critical or unfavorable in tone.
• Grey / neutral: coverage is predominantly factual with no strong sentiment in either direction, or the overall sentiment is balanced.

Color intensity

Saturation indicates the strength of sentiment:

• Darker / more saturated: strong, consistent sentiment across local sources in that region.
• Lighter / less saturated: mild or mixed sentiment — sources in the region are not aligned.

When to Use It

The Sentiment Map is most useful when geographic differences in perception are strategically relevant. Common use cases:

• Political topics:  regional divides in how a policy, party, or figure is covered. Useful for identifying areas of resistance or support.
• Brand or institutional reputation: locations where coverage is disproportionately negative, signalling a potential local crisis or communications gap.
• Crisis management:  how sentiment evolves geographically over time as a story develops. Can be combined with date range filters to track spread.
• Regional campaigns: validate whether a campaign message is landing differently across target regions.

National vs. Global: The Geographic Distribution of a Topic

The architecture of NewsVibe’s analysis module automatically adapts to the geographic scope of the monitoring, offering two levels of complexity:

• In-depth analysis (local): For the Romanian media ecosystem, the algorithms generate the Sentiment Map, a granular mapping that decodes the media’s attitude at the county level.

• Comparative analysis (international): For global topics monitored across borders, the platform switches to a macro-regional analysis console. This displays a comprehensive index of all targeted countries, calculating a complete perception profile for each one: the total volume of mentions, the polarity of the dominant sentiment, and the degree of media penetration (the percentage of national sources that covered the topic).