Newspaper Trends in Early 2020

Another brief update to bring this blog temporarily up-to-date on my tracking of front page stories in U.S. newspapers. At the end of 2019, the dominating story line was the impeachment of President Trump. So far in 2020, the dominating story line is…the impeachment of President Trump.

Note the sad gap over the first few days of 2020. The Newseum is the source of my raw data–the PDFs of newspaper front pages. On January 1st, the structure of that website changed and I didn’t get around to fixing the pipeline for a few days. So some data was tragically lost. 😦

While no 2020 story has achieved the single day dominance that occurred after the President was officially impeached by the House on December 18th, the impeachment story continued to dominate the front pages throughout the Senate trial (still technically ongoing as of this writing).

However, a few different stories managed to squeeze in the gaps left by the impeachment saga. First, the U.S. killing of Iran’s Soleimani general occurred in early January. The biggest news days probably happened during the lost data days, but the killing did have several days as the top story even after the data pipeline started flowing again. Compared to the U.S. killing of ISIS’ leader in late October (second biggest story in the figure above), the killing of Soleimani had substantially more staying power. The killing of the leader of ISIS dropped off the top story list     after just 2 days. Soleimani lasted substantially longer than that.

Finally, the new 2019 coronavirus coming out of China has finally started to break into the top story list in U.S. newspapers. More on that in a later post.