Sentiment analysis of Lim Young-woong’s media coverage : At the Intersection of Fandom, Journalism, and Popular Culture

This study analyzed 39,739 news articles related to Trot singer Lim Young-woong, a representative figure in Trot, one of Korea’s longstanding popular music genres, using sentiment analysis to quantitatively examine the distribution of emotional codes-positive, negative, and neutral. The dataset spans a nine-year period from 2016 to 2024. Utilizing the text mining tool TextBlob, emotional tone was classified based on the combined content of the article headlines and main texts. The analysis revealed that neutral articles accounted for an overwhelming majority, whereas both positive and negative articles comprised relatively small proportions. The positive articles predominantly featured content that reinforced Lim Young-woong’s favorable public image, including themes such as his commitment to fans, charitable activities, and sincerity. In contrast, a significant number of articles categorized as negative did not actually contain negative content; instead, these were cases of misclassification owing to linguistic limitations of the sentiment analysis tool. In particular, the surge in negative articles in 2023 was primarily attributed to the misinterpretation of English terms such as ‘little’ and ‘hero’ in the program title My Little Hero, which were incorrectly perceived as negative by the algorithm. Through sentiment analysis, this study empirically explores how Lim Young-woong, a major trot artist, is emotionally represented in Korean media coverage. It sheds light on the intersection of fandom culture, journalism, and popular culture and quantitatively maps the emotional codes within cultural discourse. The findings provide foundational insights for analyzing the affective tendencies of Korean music journalism and its relationship with the broader media environment.