Destination image significantly influences a tourist’s decision-making process. The impact of newsmedia coverage on destination image has attracted research attention and became particularly evi-dent after catastrophic events such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake that triggered a series oflethal tsunamis. Building upon previous research, this article analyzes the prevalence of tourismdestinations among 162 international media sites. Term frequency captures the attention a destina-tion receives—from a general and, after contextual filtering, from a tourism perspective. Calculat-ing sentiment estimates positive and negative media influences on destination image at a givenpoint in time. Identifying semantic associations with the names of countries and major cities, theresults of co-occurrence analysis reveal the public profiles of destinations, and the impact of cur-rent events on media coverage. These results allow national tourism organizations to assess howtheir destination is covered by news media in general, and in a specific tourism context. To guideanalysts and marketers in this assessment, an iterative analysis of semantic associations extractstourism knowledge automatically, and represents this knowledge as ontological structures.Key words: Knowledge acquisition; News media; Destination coverage; Sentiment analysis;Tourism ontology