Breaking Down the News: January

My double majors are journalism and analytics. I like being on top of the news and knowing about the world. I like working with data and visualizing the trends they contain. Until now, though, I haven't had a consistent way to combine those interests. That's changing with my new monthly article, breaking down the news trends of the month.

I'm subscribed to the email alerts for Fox News and the New York Times. Those are two significantly different outlets and they cover slightly different news stories. I've collected those news alerts into an Excel file containing important meta details about the stories. All those trends are then fed into RStudio, one of the main data analysis programs, to break down and graph the trends contained by them.

Daily Breakdown of Headlines

The first thing that jumps out from this daily breakdown is the general lack of stories during the government shutdown. The gap during the weekend of the 22nd was a pretty significant break from the speed of the news cycle surrounding it. It's the lowest two day section of the graph and it includes the deal that actually reopened the government.

It's also interesting that the biggest spikes for articles weren't because of specific events. As I labeled on the graph, January 9th had the late-breaking result of Alabama's college football championship and Steve Bannon leaving his terrible website. But the day also had mudslides in California, noted racist Joe Arpaio announcing his Senate run, and a major court ruling on immigration. The collection of all these smaller stories causes peaks while also drowning out some of the headlines in the long run.

Biggest Stories of the Month

Not an especially surprising pair at the top of the month, but the other big stories are a little more interesting. Let me define a couple of the terms I'm using here to categorize these stories.

• "Death" is not about the broad subject of mortality as much as a count of the celebrity deaths that made headlines. Those seven headlines included people as varied as sci-fi author Ursula le Guin and IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad. The only death that earned a news update from both outlets was Dolores O'Riordan of The Cranberries.

• The "surveillance memo" is the Nunes memo that was just released, but I happened to list it by the subject instead of the author. That will not be the case again when I make my post for February.

• "State of the Union" could easily have been the top news story. Fox News offered a live-stream of highlights from Trump's speech and the main subjects that he mentioned. If each of those had been counted individually by me, it would have been the top day and story of the month. I decided against doing that to balance the number of headlines more evenly and because few of the things Trump said actually count as 'news.'

• I would never have expected to need a category called "Shithole" to cover a national political story, but here we are.

Comparing the Outlets