Project Information Literacy (a nonprofit research institute that I work with) just released a two part report on the way the Covid news story grew and changed in the first 100 days of 2020. For this report, an author team of 5 researchers, myself included, looked at a data set that drew from more than 125,000 mainstream news articles from 66 U.S. news websites.

The first report focused on the shape and acceleration of news about Covid in the first 100 days of 2020. The main findings in the first report are that the news of Covid-19 hit the US in 3 distinct waves of news, that the news outlet that published the most on Covid was Business Insider, publishing twice as many stories as The New York Times, and finally, as the demand for more US-based news coverage grew, the coverage evolved and was circulated more widely across platforms.

The second report focuses on the visual imaging that accompanied reporting on Covid-19. In looking at a random sample of 532 images from the top 12 news outlets (identified in report 1) we coded for themes (using Krippendorff’s alpha to achieve inter-coder reliability), and identified 5 dominant emotional visual themes: fear, hope, loneliness, determination, and grief. The theme of fear was present in all 3 waves of news, but the themes of hope and grief became more prevalent once Covid-19 cases were identified on US soil.

These reports are also accompanied by Learning Resources which are meant to help teach news and visual literacy, against the backdrop of this data set.This is the first time in PIL’s 10+ year history that we’ve written instruction materials for our reports, which was an exciting and fun change for us.

Check out the reports, and feel free to reach out if you have questions.