Evaluation of a Company’s Media Reputation Based on the Articles Published on News Portals

A company’s reputation is an important, intangible asset, which is heavily influenced by media reputation. We developed a method to measure a company’s reputation based on sentiments detected in online articles. The sentiment of each sentence was evaluated and categorized into one of three polarities: positive, negative, or neutral. Then, we developed another method to assess a company’s media reputation using all available online articles about the company. The company’s media reputation is presented as a tuple consisting of their media reputation on a scale from 0 to 100, the number of articles related to the company, and the margin of error. Experiments were conducted using articles written in Lithuanian published on major news portals. We used two different tools to assess the sentiments of the articles: Stanford CoreNLP v.4.5.10, combined with Google API, and the pre-trained transformer model XLM-RoBERTa. Google API was used for translation into English, as Stanford CoreNLP does not support the Lithuanian language. The results obtained were compared with those of existing methods, based on the coefficients of media endorsement and media favorableness, showing that the results of the proposed method are less moderate than the coefficient of media favorableness and less extreme than the coefficient of media endorsement.