The Local Angle

Finding local relevance in national news

The Local Angle
TitleThe Local Angle
WorkLanguage & AI
Drawnbradley.technology

A national story can matter to a town it never mentions: the executive at its center grew up there, or the company involved is headquartered down the road. Anyone scanning by dateline misses that.

The Local Angle, released by the Knight Lab in 2012, found the people, companies, and organizations in national news stories and tied them to places: a person's birthplace or residence, a company's headquarters. Pick a state, and it listed the stories with a tie to each of its cities, labeled with who the tie was and what kind.

The Local Angle. Find locally relevant stories in national news. Below the title, a map of the United States with each state outlined, to pick a state from
Home page map.
The Local Angle for cities in Illinois: a table of city, local angle, and the story it was mentioned in, from Blue Island and Curtis Granderson down to Eureka and Ben Zobrist
Illinois page.
A story titled 'What to expect from Intel at CES' tied to Cupertino through Apple's headquarters, to San Francisco through Paul Otellini's birthplace, and to Santa Clara through Intel's headquarters
A story and its geographic ties, from the IUI 2013 paper.

Stories came from the Google News Search API, AlchemyAPI found the entities, and DBpedia supplied the places. Within a city the stories were ranked to favor entities that were prominent in the story and less famous overall, so that a national story about someone with an unobvious local tie rose above the daily Obama coverage under Honolulu.

Published as Finding the Local Angle in National News at IUI 2013, with Shawn O'BanionShawn O'BanionSenior software engineering manager at Google, working on large-scale machine learning. PhD in computer science from Northwestern, where he built The Local Angle at the InfoLab.LinkedIn ↗ and Larry BirnbaumLarry BirnbaumProfessor of computer science at Northwestern and co-director of its Intelligent Information Laboratory. Co-founded Narrative Science and was its chief scientific adviser.LinkedIn ↗.