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.
Let’s begin with March 7th.
Mar 7th: Booking Airbnb’s to support Ukraine
A community idea to book Airbnb stays as another method of aiding Ukrainian residents during the invasion has spread across social media and resulted in more than 61,000 nights booked, amounting to a value of nearly $2 million.
This is in addition to other commitments made by Airbnb in the past week to house 100,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine.
In terms of article impact, pieces that were published since February 27th about Airbnb and Ukraine have generated more than 900k engagements. The earlier announcements about Airbnb’s housing relief initiative peaked at 34k engagements on February 28th. The community-led idea to book stays in Ukraine, far surpassed that level of interest, peaking at 344k engagements on Saturday.
Mar 8th: Attention increasing on rising gas prices
One consequence of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine is that many Western companies swiftly cut off purchases of Russian oil either voluntarily or as part of the sanctions program against the country.Â
The dwindling global supply of oil that has resulted from this has caused a surge in gas and oil prices, of which people are beginning to take notice.
The most engaged articles have tended to be about North American gas prices, with many coming from conservative sites. San Francisco seeing prices hit $5 per gallon was one of the most engaged pieces.
Mar 9th: Starbucks closes businesses in Russia
Yesterday, Starbucks closed down its businesses in Russia, following the lead of governments and companies around the world.
There were more than 1.8k articles on the subject, driving 360k engagements, with a huge spike in interest towards the end of the day yesterday.
The biggest story on the move came from TMZ, with more than 70k engagements. The Washington Post’s piece framing it as a reaction to a list of companies that were still in Russia that was circulating also had a high level of attention.
Mar 10th: Roman Abramovich sanctioned by UK government
As part of a reaction to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, the UK government today announced a new set of sanctions against people with ties to Putin, among whom was Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich.Â
Abramovich has been in the news a lot lately, thanks to his attempt to distance himself from football by putting the club up for sale.
So far, his decision to sell the club generated more interest than the sanctions, but media interest spiked as soon as the news broke, so it remains to be seen if public interest will follow suit. Some stories, such as this from the BBC, are predicted to rise to more than 25k interactions today.
Mar 11th: When distrust defies society’s relationship with government and media
Recently we hosted Edelman’s Tonia Ries on the NewsWhip Pulse to talk about this year’s iteration of the Trust Barometer.Â
How does one measure trust? That measurement, according to Ries, boils down to an evaluation of competency and ethics for each institution.
If you’d like to read the summary of the chat, you can do that here, or watch the full thing on YouTube.
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.
