In the area of media analysis, one of the key tasks is collecting detailed information about opinions and attitudes toward specific topics from various sources, both offline (traditional newspapers, archives) and online (news sites, blogs, forums).
media analysis concerns the following system task: given a topic and list of documents (discussing the topic), find all instances of attitudes toward the topic (e.g., positive/negative sentiments, or, if the topic is an organization or person, support/criticism of this entity).