This template is one of 70+ report templates that is available in Truescope Analyst, your AI media analyst teammate. Book a demo to use this template or to create your own reusable template.
Goes beyond reporting whether coverage is positive or negative to explain why: the specific topics, people, themes and stories driving your sentiment, and where it is worth a closer look.
What it does
This template runs a causal read on your sentiment. Most sentiment reports give you a number. This one tells you what is behind the number. Truescope measures sentiment at three nested levels, the article as a whole, the named people and companies within it, and the individual themes, and across two dimensions, the direction of feeling and its intensity. The deep dive uses all of them, so you can see that an article praising your brand can still carry criticism of a named executive, or that a theme is becoming more emotionally charged even while the headline sentiment looks flat. Rising intensity with flat direction is the early signature of a crisis forming, and this template is built to catch it.
The questions it answers
- What specific topics and themes are pulling our sentiment up, and which are dragging it down?
- Are particular executives being criticised even when articles about the brand read positively?
- Which sources and journalists are our champions, and which are consistent antagonists?
- Is coverage becoming more emotionally charged, regardless of whether it is positive or negative?
- Which negative narratives are coherent and growing, and which are just scattered noise?
What's in the report
The report opens with a headline scorecard: volume, net sentiment, sentiment intensity and the full positive, negative, neutral and mixed breakdown, each against the previous period, followed by a one-line diagnosis of the period's state, from positive momentum building through to early crisis signature.
It then works down through the layers:
- A sentiment trend over time showing both direction and intensity, flagging any point where the two diverged.
- Sentiment by topic, identifying the topic-level levers that move your sentiment most in each direction.
- Sentiment by source and source quality, revealing whether your most authoritative outlets are framing you better or worse than the long tail, plus a friend-and-foe map of your most critical and most favourable sources.
- Sentiment by journalist, naming champions and antagonists, cleaned of wire bylines and generic credits.
- Sentiment toward named individuals and named companies, where the difference between how an article feels about your brand and how it feels about a specific person inside it is made explicit.
- Theme-level sentiment, including a ranked list of the highest-impact negative themes by reach and intensity combined.
- Negative and positive cluster analysis, grouping coverage into coherent narratives, naming each issue in plain language, and classifying it as growing, stable, fading or a one-off spike.
- The outlier stories whose reach and intensity give them outsized influence, and a closing "where to investigate" list of specific things worth a follow-up.
Movement is benchmarked against the immediately preceding period, and every cluster, outlier and theme is cited back to the source coverage that supports it.
Who it's for
This is for communications and PR teams who need to understand the drivers behind a sentiment shift, issues and reputation managers tracking the early signs of a problem, and analysts who have to explain to executives not just that sentiment moved but exactly why. It is the template you reach for when "sentiment is down" is not a good enough answer.
How to use this template
This template runs inside Truescope Analyst, the AI media analyst in the Truescope platform. Point it at your own coverage, set the window, and Analyst returns the full report with every claim cited to source. You can also save your own analysis as a reusable template and run it on a schedule. Book a demo and we will run this one on your coverage.
Why Truescope Analyst
Working out what is actually driving sentiment by hand means reading hundreds of articles, judging tone consistently across all of them, separating criticism of a person from criticism of the brand, and spotting which negative threads connect, which is slow, subjective and rarely repeatable. A general AI tool can summarise a few articles you paste in, but it cannot weigh per-entity sentiment, measure intensity, rank themes by combined reach and intensity, or cite what it found. Truescope Analyst reasons across your full media dataset using all three sentiment levels and both dimensions, surfaces the clusters and divergences a human read would miss, and grounds every finding in cited stories. It runs in minutes, sits inside your subscription, and can be rerun by anyone the moment the sentiment picture shifts.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between sentiment direction and intensity?
Direction is whether coverage is positive or negative. Intensity is how strongly that feeling is expressed, regardless of which way it points. Tracking both matters because a period where intensity is rising while direction stays flat is often the first sign of a crisis forming, and a direction-only read would miss it entirely.
Can it track sentiment toward specific people and competitors?
Yes. You can name individuals such as spokespeople or executives, and named companies such as competitors or partners, and the deep dive reports sentiment toward each of them specifically, separate from the overall article sentiment. This surfaces cases where the brand is framed positively but a named person is being criticised, and how competitors are positioned within your own coverage. If you do not name any, those sections note what extra depth they would have added.
What time range can it analyse?
Up to the last 13 months for coverage already in your Truescope inbox, or the last 90 days for global data not yet matched to your workspace. Shorter windows are read at a finer interval and longer ones more coarsely, and each is benchmarked against the equivalent period immediately before it, with the longest window treated as approximate at its edge.
