  As the disruptive changes in the media economy and the proliferation of
alternative news media outlets, news intent has progressively deviated from
ethical standards that serve the public interest. News intent refers to the
purpose or intention behind the creation of a news article. While the
significance of research on news intent has been widely acknowledged, the
absence of a systematic news intent understanding framework hinders further
exploration of news intent and its downstream applications. To bridge this gap,
we propose News INTent (NINT) frame, the first component-aware formalism for
understanding the news creation intent based on research in philosophy,
psychology, and cognitive science. Within this frame, we define the news intent
identification task and provide a benchmark dataset with fine-grained labels
along with an efficient benchmark method. Experiments demonstrate that NINT is
beneficial in both the intent identification task and downstream tasks that
demand a profound understanding of news. This work marks a foundational step
towards a more systematic exploration of news creation intents.
