Welcome to the NewsWhip Daily spotlight round-up for the week of May 16th. This week, Elon Musk’s Twitter deal is on hold, and the media reacts to a Netflix “culture memo.”
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May 16th: Reaction to Elon Musk putting the Twitter deal on hold
Early on Friday morning, Elon Musk tweeted that the Twitter deal was on hold while his team investigated whether Twitter’s estimates that bots made up less than 5% of users were true. He also later tweeted that they would be investigating this by testing a random sample of 100 of Musk’s own followers.
Needless to say, this generated a lot of coverage, with more than 14.5k articles published, and north of 2 million engagements to reporting about the deal being on hold. The top articles came from Yahoo and CNBC, which had around 50k engagements each.
May 17th: Media reacts to Netflix “culture memo”
This week, news emerged of a corporate culture memo sent to Netflix employees about the aims of the company and content production going forward.
This has become a huge story, especially among right-wing media, and there have been more than 500 stories that have received almost a million engagements, with the top piece coming from The Daily Wire, who described the memo as a “warning shot at its woke employees”.
The memo was first reported on May 12th, and has since gone on to be a multi-day story, as first conservative media and their audiences reacted positively to it. Elon Musk tweeted his approval about it, and then the media wrote about Musk’s comments on the memo.Â
New pieces are still being written today, and the highest level of engagement coming yesterday — five days after it was first reported.
May 18th: Equal pay for US soccer teams agreed by unions
A developing story this morning is a historic agreement between the team unions for the Men’s and Women’s National teams about equal pay.Â
The news only broke two hours ago, and there have already been more than 1,000 articles in the first two hours, with more than 150k engagements to those articles, and likely to keep rising and become a big narrative today.
NPR had the top article with 56k engagements, but engagement to coverage was also spread around on the web, with Sport Bible, CBS News, and CNN all having thousands of engagements.
On Facebook, NPR and the New York Times had the most engagement, with more than 34k and 21k engagements respectively.
May 19th: Monkeypox cases confirmed in US, UK, and Europe
Monkeypox cases in the UK, Spain, and Portugal have caused quite the stir for both the media and the public in the last few weeks, as experts in the countries have so far struggled to explain its origin and spread.Â
So far, since the first case was reported in the UK on May 7th, there have been more than 7,000 articles written, and more than 640k engagements.
Both media and public interest really picked up significantly yesterday, when the first case was confirmed in the US. The Daily Mail had one of the top articles on the case in Massachusetts with 28k engagements, while NPR had the top article overall so far with 35k engagements, asking whether we should worry about the influx of cases.
Media and public interest looks set to continue based on the chart from today so far, which is already at higher levels than it has been on any day except yesterday.
May 20th: Apple sued over AirPods
This week, Apple has faced a lawsuit alleging that its AirPods increased in volume without warning and permanently damaged a young boy’s hearing.
This serves as an interesting case study in the often-occurring disparity between media and public interest, which peak at very different times here.
Wire services picked up the story on May 17th, to little fanfare, with a few hundred engagements here and there. This was the peak of media coverage, but it was not until TMZ covered the lawsuit the next day that the public began to pay attention, and this renewed attention also drove a second wave of media coverage. All in all, TMZ was responsible for around 17k of the 53k engagements so far.
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.
