The Year in News 2016

For the third year running, we’re visualizing The Year in News through data collected from 2 billion tweets throughout the course of 2016. That number alone is a big deal: it’s up 337% from the 459.9 million U.S. tweets we estimated were about major news stories in 2015.

This year, one news story dominated them all: the Presidential election. Fully 40% of news tweets were about either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, the vast majority tweeted during the final 3 months of the election. While D.C. has grown accustomed to a never-ending 2 year campaign, from the public’s point of view, the vast majority of interest and intensity occurs at the end of the campaign, based on mention volume.

Because the election was so dominant, we’ve done this year’s report a bit differently than previous years, analyzing the election (including a special section on scandals and controversies), followed by the non-election stories that defined the year.

For more information: Echelon Insights and Optimized Listening.