Chartbeat monitors a wide swathe of coverage. In an annual summary of readership calculated for The Economist, it compiled data on 4m articles from 5,000 sites across 34 topics. Half of the publishers it tracks are in English-speaking countries, and a quarter in continental Europe.
Source: The Economist
Although no subject rivals Mr Trump for sustained interest, readership about him on specific days often lagged behind breaking news. The event that most riveted audiences was the fire that gutted Notre Dame cathedral in Paris on April 15th, with 1m reading hours in its immediate aftermath. The journalistic cliché that “if it bleeds, it leads” held up well in 2019, as the top ten events also included mass murders in New Zealand on March 15th and America on August 3rd. But the mostly Western readers tracked by Chartbeat paid less attention to long-running violence in poor parts of the world. Afghanistan got 2m hours in 2019, as much as Mr Trump generates in a week.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
