Using TRENDS to Spot Emerging Stories 

The TRENDS section in the NewsVibe platform helps you identify entities and topics that are experiencing rapid growth in news coverage, so you can spot emerging stories before they go mainstream. Enter any search term and NewsVibe will rank the entities co-occurring within its resulting content (articles and social media posts) by their rate of increase compared to the previous equivalent period, no saved report required.

 How TRENDS works

When you enter a search term, TRENDS pulls every mention of that term from the selected date range and, within the aggregated content (articles and posts) runs calculations and compares the volume against the preceding period of equal length. The result is a ranked list of entities extracted from that content, ordered by their trend score, so that the percentage increase in mentions is relative to the baseline period.

Dramatic percentages (e.g. 18,000%) are common for entities that were barely mentioned before and have suddenly surged, signaling breakout stories, not an error.

The TRENDS interface

The interface is split into two panels:

Semantic Analysis

A word cloud of named entities and keywords identified within the content associated with your search term, sized by trend growth. The larger the word, the sharper the recent increase in mention volume compared to the previous period.

Top Entities

A ranked list of the people, organisations, institutions, places etcc most frequently mentioned within the content that contains your searched term, ordered by growth rate. Each row shows:

• Hits: Total number of articles or posts mentioning that entity in the selected period.
• Trend: Percentage increase in mention volume compared to the previous period of equal length. This is what the ranking is sorted by.
• Hits chart: A sparkline showing how mention volume evolved across the selected interval, useful for spotting whether growth is sustained or a one-day spike.
• Tone: Average sentiment score of articles mentioning that entity. See detailed article on sentiment analysis as measured by the NewsVibe platform.
• Channels: Icons representing the channels where this growth was noticed (web, Facebook, YouTube and/or TikTok).

“In the news” Section:

• For each entity that you select (by clicking on it in the “Top Entities” list, or in the word cloud on the left – for saved reports only), the “In the news” section below filters the articles containing that entity which explain its growth for the chosen period of time.