Breaking Down the News: July

A firefighting plane attempts to put out wildfires along the coast of Greece on July 20.

Photo by Yannis Behrakis, Reuters.

Daily News Breakdown

Just graphically speaking, this was one of the trickiest displays I've had to make for this news-tracking project. Brett Kavanaugh's nomination for the Supreme Court was a critical event but getting it to fit on the display took some effort. There were four days in a row with eight or more headlines, but those were generated by a huge variety of stories. I went with the Greek wildfires and the economy aid for farmers, which major events that were indicative of larger trends. But I could easily have replaced those with the collapse of Facebook's stock price or Trump's threat to revoke security clearances. The back half of this month was filled with those types of small stories that piled up into a relatively short period of time.

It's also been a long time since there was a story like the Thai soccer team that was rescued from the flooded cave. This is the kind of small-scale but high-stakes tragedy that will always generate tons of headlines from a variety of outlets. An international news story based in a single location and centered on children? Life and death stakes, including the tragic death of one rescue diver, but with a sense of optimism throughout? A slow, dramatic rescue mission that lasted several days and provided a constant stream of survivors? A celebrity making a complete ass of themselves? The cave rescue had all of this and deservedly earned two markers on the above graph from the sheer length of coverage it earned.

Most Popular News Topics

• Even with the perfect storm of coverage around the Thai cave rescue, it did not generate the most headlines this month. That's because Trump not only met with Vladimir Putin for an extended period of time in Helsinki, but tried to invite him to come to Washington DC for a second meeting. That second wave of headlines is what pushed that topic to the top of the list. It also helped that Fox News sent out alerts promoting three televised interviews with either Trump or Putin during their initial meeting.

• I usually reserve the 'Trump' category for either his tweets and conversations that earn headlines or stories about him in a broader sense. The stories that fell within that category this month could easily have been split into their own sub-categories. Three of the headlines were on his tweets attacking Iranian President Rouhani, two were on his opinions about Russia, and one was a more general interview about his policies.

• I separated out the Trader Joes hostage situation from the other police-related shootings for two reasons. One was that it was originally covered as 'just' a hostage situation at the store in Los Angeles. The other is that none of the other incidents generated multiple headlines and were therefore easier to lump together.

• I'm a little surprised the duck boat sinking in Missouri had so few headlines, at least relatively. At the time, it definitely felt like a larger tragedy that inspired a huge amount of discussion. It was also one of the only stories that I had actual in-person conversations about. I was at a family reunion in Indiana and everybody seemed much more up on this event than the Michael Cohen tapes, the wildfires in Greece and California, or anything else at the bottom of this list.

Let me announce here that I'm finally making an addition to this coverage. Starting in the last week of July, I started including the alerts from the Associated Press news app in this coverage. I'll include the full effect of that addition in next month's update, when I will have a full month to see what the additional outlet changes about the frequency and subject of headlines. But just adding in that few days of AP headlines to the above graph about news topics leads to some fascinating changes in the ranking of stories.

Look at how much the coverage of wildfires around the world jumped up. Or how plane crashes are suddenly among the most discussed stories between all the outlets. And in terms of what hasn't changed, the AP news updates included absolutely nothing about the Trader Joe's shooting or police-related shootings in general. This is definitely going to accomplish my goal of getting a little more variation and international focus in this news project I've started.