What is Light News?
Light News is the solution to the trend of news outlets biasing towards negative news. According to this article from The Guardian written by Steven Pinker, news outlets started getting increasingly pessimistic starting in the late 1970’s. To combat this trend, Light News employs a filter to empower users in the ability to control the articles they see by emotions. Having a bad day? Use the filter to hide pessimistic stories so that the beneficial stories can shine through and cheer you up.
Emotion Filter
The emotion filter currently has seven different emotions; Angry, mad, sad, unhappy, neutral,happy, and ecstatic. The available emotions were chosen because they were the top seven emotions that occurred while surveyors read different articles. The emotions for an article are chosen by a group of like minded users who rate their emotional scale after reading the article. The highest rated emotion labels that article for that group of users.
Interviews
There were two rounds of interviews conducted to gather information for Light News. The first round interviewed three people from ages 20 – 30 to test how they felt about the news and the importance it had in their lives. The original plan for Malama Pono was to create an all good news outlet. This plan was changed when 100% said that they would rather see all news. ⅔ then said they would like to control the amounts of positive and negative news they saw in their feeds. From this a new Light News the new plan was to create a filtering system based on emotions for a more personalized news.
The second round of interviews was conducted with 12 people to gather their take on news. 75% of people said that at least 70% of reported news they see is negative, even though 85% say the real world is 60% or less negative. This means that news outlets are not reporting a true representation of the real world. A majority said that there is a current trend of negative news bias.
Color
The colors of Light News was inspired by newspaper printing. The CMYK of printing press is represented in the bright brand colors of Light News. Using bright colors helps emphasize the bright nature of Light News.
Lightbulb
#FFD315
Plenty Magenty
#EE4B90
Woo Blue
#42B9DC
Copy Black
#28230D
Paper White
#FAFBFB
Type
Roboto was chosen because it is easy to read on screens and has a modern look. It combines the best of classic fonts into one font. It also has a big family with many weights for flexibility. Playfair Display was also part of the brand butwas removed when it was realized that the font and brand personality clashed.
