The following link I’ve had open for over a day now, still trying to figure out how much credit to give it:

Scientists Analyse Millions of News Articles

A study led by academics at the University of Bristol’s Intelligent Systems Laboratory and the School of Journalism at Cardiff University have used Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to analyse 2.5 million articles from 498 different English-language online news outlets over ten months. The researchers found that:

As expected, readability measures show that online tabloid newspapers are more readable than broadsheets and use more sentimental language. Among 15 US and UK newspapers, the Sun is the easiest to read, comparable to the BBC’s children’s news programme, Newsround, while the Guardian is the most difficult to read. Sports’ and ‘Arts’ were the most readable topics while ‘Politics’ and ‘Environment’ were the least readable.

The Sun is also the most likely to use adjectives with sentiment, while the Wall Street Journal uses the fewest emotional adjectives.

[…]

The most appealing topics to online readers were Disasters, Crime, and the Environment while the least appealing topics were Fashion, Markets and Prices. The researchers also found that the popular articles tend to be more readable and more linguistically subjective.

[…]

The research paper is here:

Oh, and I’m not surprised The Sun was the easiest to read among the newspapers chosen for analysis. Indeed, certain segments of The Sun require absolutely no literacy at all.