Topic coverage in Peak News: what the channels write about, and how

A briefing tells you what happened. Who got the credit and who got the blame is not in there.

Peak News now has a page for that: Topic coverage. What the channels in a subscription write about, how they regard it, where they differ, and how that changes.

How a post is read

Say a channel writes:

The mayor kept his word: the new bridge opens. The contractor dragged it out for three years. The ribbon is cut on Saturday.

One post, three topics, three attitudes. The mayor is praised. The contractor is blamed. The bridge is just reported.

Every post from the subscription's channels is read like this: who or what it is about, and how it regards each one.

• Positive: the post praises, credits or defends the topic.
• Neutral: the post reports on the topic without judging it.
• Negative: the post criticises, blames or mocks the topic.

A single post says little. Hundreds of posts over a few weeks make a picture. It shows who and what the channels praise, what they blame more each week, what they have gone quiet about, and where they disagree with each other.

Where to find it

In the menu, right under Statistics. Pick a subscription and a period: 5, 14 or 28 days.

Topic coverage is available when your plan includes Statistics. If it does, there is nothing more to buy or switch on. The free period has it too.

Each period sets its recent part against the part before:

• Last 5 days: the last day against the daily average of the four before.
• Last 14 days: the last 7 days against the 7 before.
• Last 28 days: the last 14 days against the 14 before.

A new subscription starts with five days of posts. So "Last 5 days" works the same day, a few hours after the channels are added. The longer periods open as the days add up. Each one names its date right in the list.

Here two weeks of posts are in. "Last 28 days" waits for 26 October.

Open Topic coverage

What it shows

Three tabs:

• Attention. Up to six topics written about noticeably more than before, or noticeably less. What the channels suddenly found, and what they quietly dropped.
• Tone shifts. Up to six topics where the share of negative or positive posts moved most. The topic is the same, the mood is not.
• Where channels disagree. Topics one channel criticises while another praises.

One post more or less is not a change. It does not make the list.

Choose any topic and it opens. Posts per day, coloured by tone. The split by channel. And the posts themselves, each one tap from its source. Further down, a table of how each channel leans: what it writes about most, how much of that is opinion, and where its stance is clearest.

One honest note. Tone is a reading, not a fact check. A post praises the mayor. Whether he deserves it is a different question. And the figures cover only the channels of your subscription. Three channels are not public opinion. But they may well be part of it.

Meanwhile, the bridge did not open on Saturday after all.

Not everyone was upset:

Congratulations to the mayor on another victory. The bridge is open. To pigeons.

In words, praise. In fact, mockery. So it counts as negative.

Now the same two weeks in Topic coverage. The subscription has three channels: one reports the news, one stands by the mayor, one does not.

Attention: the bridge, three times the posts.

Fourteen became forty-two, and the bars stayed almost all grey. Everybody reports on the bridge, hardly anyone judges it. The contractor is another matter: one more channel took him up, and a quarter of what is written is now on his side. Tram line 5, meanwhile, is forgotten.

Tone shifts: the mayor, more negative.

The mayor is written about only a little more: 22 posts, then 30. What moved is the mood, from 18% negative to 57%. The city council, next to him, went the other way. Nobody jokes about the city council.

Open the topic "Mayor", and it shows when that happened:

The chart starts blue and ends red. Saturday is the tall one. "By channel" tells whose work it is: riverside_voice, 17 posts in a week, nearly all of them against. Below are the pigeons, marked Negative: a red square for the mayor, a grey one for the bridge.

Where channels disagree: the contractor. One channel blames him, another says he was never paid.

townhall_today: eleven posts against him, none for. riverside_voice: four for, one against. The mayor is on the list too. Same two channels, sides swapped.

And at the bottom, "How each channel leans":

city_daily: 214 posts, 4% opinion, no stance on anyone. That is what a news channel looks like. The other two hold the same two views, mirrored.

The bridge stays neutral.