Welcome to the NewsWhip Daily spotlight round-up. Every weekday morning we send a newsletter to our subscribers that predicts the top stories and social posts of the day. Here’s today’s, as an example. As part of that, we spotlight a specific topic that is gaining media and public interest across the web and discuss its impact.
These are ephemeral by design in the newsletter, so every Friday we publish a blog that catalogs each spotlight so that you can have a full view of what stories mattered during the week. If you’d like to subscribe to the newsletter itself, though, you can do that here.
As Monday was a US holiday, we’ll begin this week on February 22.
Feb 22: Credit Suisse leak exposes clients
Over the weekend, reports of a leak of Credit Suisse’s clients were published, which included what The Guardian’s reporting described as “criminals, fraudsters, and corrupt politicians.”
The chart tracking the coverage of Credit Suisse below shows exactly when the news broke, and how the public suddenly started paying attention to the bank.
The top articles came from The Guardian and The New York Times, and there was also widespread discussion on Reddit, with a post in r/worldnews having more than 100k upvotes.
Feb 23rd: Truth Social launches on the app store
Over the weekend, the Trump-backed social network Truth Social appeared on the App Store for download. While user numbers were limited to begin with and there is now a long waitlist to join the network, it still managed to generate a significant amount of coverage.
In the last week, there have been almost 7k articles written about the network, with more than a million engagements.
The top content about the app so far has mostly come from conservative sites and influencers promoting the app, including Newsmax and Sean Hannity.
Feb 24th: Russia begins invasion of Ukraine
It is a crisis that has been brewing for some time, with news and rumors of an invasion bubbling under since at least the start of the year, but the eyes of the world have truly turned to Ukraine this week as Russia sent military personnel into the country on a large scale yesterday.
Since the beginning of the year, there have been almost half a million articles written about the crisis, with focus really sharpening in the last week.
Reporting from BBC News, CBS News, the Daily Mail, and CNN have made a particular impact, focusing on criticism of Putin’s reasoning, shelling reported in Kyiv, airlines suspending flights, and Trump’s comments on Putin respectively.
Feb 25th: Anonymous targeting Russian websites in ‘cyber war’
After Russia began an offensive against Ukraine and invaded the country, hacker collective Anonymous responded by declaring its own ‘cyber war’ on Russia.
This has seen significant reporting and attention, with 174k engagements, showing wide support for Anonymous’s announcement.
Anonymous’s own post on Facebook announcing the move received tens of thousands of engagements. Interestingly, some of the most engaged articles came from the likes of 9gag and LADBible, which both had upwards of 30k engagements.
That’s all for this week, but don’t forget you can subscribe to the NewsWhip Daily to receive the top predicted stories of the morning and every spotlight delivered straight to your inbox.
