COVID-19 Pandemic: Insights of Newspaper Trends

ABSTRACT

The study aims to analyze the change in coverage of health issues awareness, printed on the front page of Indian e-papers (The Hindustan Times and The Times of India) for the pre- and peri-coronavirus period. The collected news articles are examined by performing the latent dirichlet allocation algorithm. The sentiment analysis is performed to analyze the change in the emotions aroused from news articles. The outcome regarding the pre-coronavirus period reveals that the focus of the e-papers was mostly on politics, crime, and economy whereas, in the peri-coronavirus period, the e-papers are focusing more (i.e. 40% topics) on publishing the news related to disseminating the awareness about the coronavirus disease. The priority of news topics includes the active number of cases, medical facilities, and COVID-19 testing. The outcome regarding sentiment analysis reveals that negative sentiments are prominent in the peri-coronavirus period due to fear of the outbreak of the virus.