Method / Indicator
Mood
How heavy the events are, and how heavily they are written. Not a bias measure — a restrained report of a disaster belongs at the low end, and a sensational report of the same disaster belongs lower still.
0 sorrow joyful 100
What raises it
- Lower for heavy events: death, loss, harm
- Lower again for heavy writing about them: "horror smash", "chilling"
- Higher for events that went well
What is never counted
- Hype ("must-see", "record-breaking"), which is left out of this one entirely
- Adjectives we would remove anyway
- Any suggestion that a sad story is a biased one
Highest in the last week
- Is optimising your life worth it? Here's what you had to say Mood 86.8
- Turtle Beach Rematch review: The cutest Switch 2 controller of the bunch Mood 86.5
- New generation of students carries Tongan culture forward Mood 84.7
Lowest in the last week
- Port Arthur memories 'came back' on seeing jumping castle body-cam: officer Mood 0
- Young ‘enthusiastic’ NSW Police constable Mia Lay identified after fatal Redfern crash Mood 0
- Father and uncle of young boy killed in Norwest shooting revealed as convicted cocaine dealers Mood 0
Every reading is of the writing, not of whether the article is correct. The full method, including how the Niral Score is built, is on the Method page. Anything here can be checked against the API, which returns the same numbers with the words that produced them.
The other indicators
Niral ScoreAdjectivesRepeated wordsSentimentPolitical dictionGenerationalGenderJingoisticReligiousSourcing