Further to a twitter conversation I had with Jordan Wirfs-Brock during last year's Knight-Mozilla MozNewsLab, I've been wondering how news organisations portray themselves in their taglines and website metatags.

Are there any implicit editorial statements to enable readers to discern the aims of the organisation? What can the choices of metatag tell us about the aims and editorial direction of the news organisation?

The Knight News Challenge's rapid-fire rounds continue with its latest competition, the Mobile News Challenge.

Elsewhere we suggest that examining the language used to discuss specific news topics may help readers to understand (1) the prevailing attitude of the news source towards that issue, and (2) how news sources might be shaping our own emotional or rational response to an issue because of the impact of those words.

We felt we should unpack the second idea further: can what we read or what we see about us in our environment really subconsciously influence how we think and act?

We need tools to unpick & visualise the language our news sources. This is important because it affects the way we feel about certain news topics, and the cumulative effect of certain language decisions in the news may have a long-term unconscious persuasive effect. For example, if right-wing news sources often refer to refugees in derogatory terms, this may have a political personal impact by encouraging news consumers to think ill of refugees. Although it's an open research question whether people choose news sources on the basis of pre-existing prejudices rather than have those prejudices formed by their sources, it's important to make the language transparent.

From the Nieman Journalism Lab we hear of a new news aggregator Rappler, which is asking users to specify which emotion a given news story triggers in them.

The slow burn of Olympics fever from British disgruntlement to hats-off open-mouthed mobots was captured by the Emoto project, which sucked in tweets about the games, analysed them for emotive content plus a bit of semantic divvying up into topics, and visualised the results.

Multiplicity is a platform to simplify news consumption by giving users the power over what, when, where and how they consume content. It aggregates news into a common format so users can remix and visualise the information they want, to uncover what's really happening.

In week 3 of the MozNewsLab we've been addressing the question "How does your project facilitate collaboration in the newsroom?", and treated to lectures from AP's Director of Interactive Shazna Nessa, Al Jazeera English's Head of Online Mohamed Nanabhay and information architect ninja Oliver Reichenstein.

The MozNewsLab participants have submitted their project descriptions (full data exportable here), so I thought it would be helpful to look at the frequently used terms, stripping out common terms and conjunctions.

Delving more deeply into the issue of context-aware news delivery, I wanted to thrash out some ideas about what contexts any given news reader might have, and how we might expose these as configurable variables to help inform my current brainstrain thinking about my MozNewsLab final project.