Welcome to the NewsWhip Daily spotlight round-up for the week of April 4th. This week, Amazon workers unionize in New York, and Elon Musk becomes Twitter’s largest shareholder.
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Apr 4th: Amazon gets a union
Unionization continues to be a major topic of conversation around big corporations, as manny household names are getting unions for the first time. The latest iteration of this was Amazon, whose workers in a New York warehouse unionized.
There were 5k articles written about the unionization with more than a million engagements to those articles.
If anything, media interest was slightly ahead of public interest, with hundreds of articles written as the vote was ongoing. Public interest caught up and overtook once the victory was announced on April 1st, with thousands of engagements per hour for the next three days even as media interest fell away.
Apr 5th: Elon Musk to join Twitter board
Yesterday, it was announced that Tesla CEO and serial tweeter Elon Musk had acquired a 9.2% stake in Twitter, becoming the company’s largest shareholder.
As with almost everything Musk does, this has generated significant media and public interest, with 9k articles and 1.65 million engagements. This is only set to keep rising again as, in the last hour, it was announced by the CEO Parag Agrawal that Musk will be joining the board of directors of the company.
The top individual story came from NPR, but almost all the engagement with that story was driven by Franklin Graham sharing it with his perspective on the news in the top Facebook post of the day.
Apr 6th: The continued Will Smith fallout
Often, we see scandals come and go in the space of a day or two, as the media move on to the next big thing and those involved can begin to recover their reputations.
This has decidedly not been the case for Will Smith after he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars, as even a week later the public is paying attention as studios pause or cancel projects with the megastar.
Since April 1st alone, there have been more than a thousand articles about Smith’s canceled projects, with more than a million engagements about Apple, Sony, and Netflix all moving movies to back burners.
Apr 7th: The biggest publishers on Facebook in March 2022
There was a big shakeup in the rankings this month as the Daily Mail dethroned the Daily Wire as the most engaged publisher on Facebook for the first time in more than a year.
This was brought about by both a slight rise in engagement for The Daily Mail and a slight fall in engagement for the Daily Wire compared to February.
Apr 8th: Honda and GM partner on affordable electric cars
This week, Honda and GM announced an expansion of their partnership, with the aim of producing electric vehicles that are more affordable to the general public than what is currently on the market.
The top piece came from CNN, and referenced the target price point of $30,000 for the vehicles. The article had 11k engagements, while a similar one in CNBC had around 8k engagements, making these the two dominant pieces of coverage.
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.
