Hi HN,<p>I built "Vision Zero Reporting" (<a href="https://visionzeroreporting.com" rel="nofollow">https://visionzeroreporting.com</a>), a tool to detect editorial anti-patterns in local news coverage of car crashes.<p>Maybe you've noticed that local news articles about car crashes, especially those that involve "vulnerable road users" (VRU) such as bicyclists and pedestrians, tend to employ language that seems to blame the victim or only discuss the incident as an isolated event, rather than in context that crashes are preventable and are caused by specific reasons.<p>This tool is meant to help news publishers check their articles and learn the anti-patterns to avoid.<p>Here's a brief explanation of the problems my tool checks for:<p>1. Focus - Readers find the focus/subject of the sentence more in control of the situation, and hence more blameworthy (e.g. "A pedestrian was struck by a driver" VS "A driver struck a pedestrian").<p>2. Agency - Some sentences lack an agent altogether, which places more blame on the recipient (e.g. "A bicyclist was hit." VS "A bicyclist was hit by a driver.")<p>3. Object-based reference - Pedestrians and bicyclists are almost always referred to using people-based language, but drivers are referred to using object-based language 81% of the time [1] (e.g. "The vehicle fled the scene" VS "The driver fled the scene"). This language personifies and gives agency to vehicles rather than their drivers.<p>4. Accident - Accident is the most-used term in articles to describe the incident (47%). This term is being phased out by some news agencies because the word implies a sense of inevitability or that it happened purely by chance, when we know why car crashes happen and can take preventative action.<p>5. Framing - (still in beta) Articles employ an "episodic" frame, meaning they describe crashes as isolated incidents. Only 6% (!) of articles use "thematic" framing [1], meaning they contextualize the event by discussing road design, number of recent crashes in the area, quote experts, educate readers about road safety initiatives, etc.<p>6. Counterfactual - (still in beta) Counterfactuals are true statements, but imply the outcome could have been changed had the victim acted differently. While reporters may see these statements as sticking-to-the-facts, we've discovered in 700+ manually-annotated articles that counterfactuals almost always shift blame toward the victim (A bicyclist was struck; he wasn't wearing a helmet. It was dark outside, the biker wasn't wearing reflective clothing, and the driver told police he didn't see the bicyclist until it was too late.) Notice that all of these statements may be true, but goes hand-in-hand with the Framing issue discussed above: the bicyclist was hit, but is that because there is no protected bike lane? It was dark outside, but is road visibility a municipal obligation?<p>I'm looking for constructive feedback to make this tool better!<p>My work is based primarily on the following research papers (and I've already shown the tool to the authors - they loved it!):<p>[1] <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330975590_Editorial_Patterns_in_Bicyclist_and_Pedestrian_Crash_Reporting" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330975590_Editorial...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337279845_Does_news_coverage_of_traffic_crashes_affect_perceived_blame_and_preferred_solutions_Evidence_from_an_experiment" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337279845_Does_news...</a>