The role of SPIEGEL readers’ comments in shaping the reputation of news media

The article analyzes the news post readers’ comments on the social networking sites. The author admits that the users’ comments have a significant role in establishing a good or bad digital reputation for online mass-media. The readers’ comments are considered as “evaluative statements” with all their essential elements (subject, object, basis of evaluation), whose structure and semantics are being analyzed in this article. The author dwells on the media of general evaluation (good – bad) in in readers’ comments. Moreover, the author investigates the partial evaluation in readers’ statements. Besides, the author emphasizes some difficulties, which are connected with the extraction of the basis of evaluation. The author points out the news’ topics, which caused positive (e.g. the news about someone’s tragedy/problems or posts about peace, unity or love) or negative (e.g. coronavirus’ statistics) readers’ reaction.