The Lifespan of News Stories

Neat site with some interesting insights into the current state of media. Be cool if they turned it into a larger scale project with long running updates and statistics on search behavior and categorization. Seems like there's other time varying trend stuff that could also be visualized with this type of colorized, overlapping, stock trade volume visualization style.

Few of the categories are a bit questionable. The Social Events stuff seems to have a lot of stories that would have been better in the Violence section and would have made the trends somewhat clearer.

Example, if McDonald Shooting, Florida Bomber, Austin Bomber, Parkland Shooting, Capital Gazette Shooting, and Synagogue Shooting are put into a category of "Violent Crime" then the trend and shape are much clearer. Sharp spike of maybe a day, with rapid roll-off and rarely more than a day or two of media traction.

However, in the current setup, the shapes are distorted by the mystery of "The Disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi", and the long term criminal justice of "Larry Nassar Sentencing" and "Cristine Blasey Ford's Hearing", making the categories seem like long term attention. Yet the correlation is for slowly unraveling mysteries with multiple info releases and several "twists".

The environment and science stuff is interesting, just because you can see why news doesn't print much. Very little long term traction with the current reporting style. Somebody announced something, or a report got released, very little long term follow through, discussion, or mystery involved. "There's a climate report, it says there's a dire risk. Done."

Politics was a bit surprising with how little traction there was. It "seems" like politics, elections especially would have longer term search interest, yet the only stuff that got much was NAFTA, Brett Kavanaugh Confirmation, and the Migrant Caravan. Space Force got a little bit of long term.