Notre Dame: How social media impacted legacy media–and vice versa
The world was watching as the roof of Notre Dame de Paris caught fire on Monday evening and the devastation of Parisians was broadcast to millions of screens around the world. Over the news and social media, the tragedy spread quickly and GEN spoke to Becky Pinnington, trends data curator for Google News Lab, and James Morgan, CrowdTangle/Facebook’s EMEA partner manager, about the impact of Notre Dame’s fire on social media, in particular, Google and Facebook.
Since the Global Editors Network is based in Paris, the fire at Notre Dame hits close to home and we were rushing to work together with Becky Pinnington from Google News Lab and James Morgan from CrowdTangle/Facebook, who quickly put together a very comprehensive overview of the impact of the Notre Dame fire on social media. In times like these when people turn to the news for insight, it is also enthralling to see what is going on behind the feeds and search bars — and thanks to Becky Pinnington and James Morgan we are able to have an in-depth look of the tragedy from two different angles, data and interaction on social media.
How the world searched for Notre Dame
By Becky Pinnington, Trends Data Curator for Google News Lab
On Monday, both the news and social media were dominated by the tragic fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. As images of the cathedral in flames shocked the world, we can see how people took to Google to try and make sense of events. In the hours following the blaze, search interest in Notre Dame spiked even above the weather, which is one of the most-searched topics on Google almost every day.
How the news spread
Over the 24 hours following the fire, the sad news spread throughout the world. As the map below shows, Notre Dame was quickly searched across the world as news of the fire broke. Search interest was particularly strong in Europe and North America, with the highest levels of search early in the news cycle.
After the first 24 hours, search interest began to tail off, although there was still a wide geographical spread. 48 hours after news first broke, France had sustained the strongest level of search interest, as interest in other countries had declined further.
Search interest by country
The map below shows search interest in Notre Dame around the world in the 24 hours following the fire. The shaded countries show search interest in the cathedral itself, while the proportional circles show searches for both Notre Dame and donations. Both values have been normalised, and indexed to 100 (search interest is indexed and represented as relative values from 1 to 100). The interactive map here guides through how the world searched for the fire at Notre Dame.
France was the top country searching for Notre Dame, which is not surprising seeing as the cathedral is in Paris. Following France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Belgium were the top countries searching for the cathedral in the first 24 hours after the fire.
Although France had high search interest in Notre Dame, it ranked seventh among countries searching for Notre-Dame and donations. Germany was the top country searching for donations, followed by Austria, Spain, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.
Related topics
In the 24 hours following the fire, Notre Dame Cathedral was the most-searched topic on Google in the world. Besides this, many related topics saw huge spikes in search interest.
In France, these included Victor Hugo’s novel Notre-Dame de Paris, and billionaire philanthropist François Pinault, who donated €100million to the cathedral in the wake of the blaze. Both topics spiked by over 5,000%. Search interest in Nantes Cathedral also spiked by 550%, possibly due to its having been destroyed by a fire and swiftly rebuilt in the 1970s.
Worldwide, the topic of conflagration spiked by 1,750% in this time. In the US, there was some confusion as the University of Notre Dame in Indiana became a breakout search, spiking by over 5,000%.
Top questions
The top four English language questions asked on Google in the 24 hours following the fire were about Notre Dame: When was Notre-Dame built? How old is Notre-Dame? What caused the Notre-Dame fire? How did the Notre-Dame fire start? The fifth asked, “When is Easter?”
In France, four of the top five, and seven of the top ten, most-searched questions asked in the same period were related to Notre Dame. These included (translated from the French): Who does Notre-Dame belong to? Who built Notre-Dame? Who are the Pinault family? Why is Notre-Dame on fire? How long will it take to rebuild Notre-Dame?
Although search interest in the cathedral has levelled out since its initial spike on Monday evening, these questions have continued to rank highly, particularly in France.
Thanks to Jenny Lee for her help with data visualizations for this piece. See this Medium post for more information on normalized Google Trends data.
How live streams are impacting social media
By James Morgan, CrowdTangle/Facebook partner manager, EMEA
The fire at Notre Dame de Paris sparked an outpouring of collective grief on social media that transcended borders, languages and religions. Livestreams transported the pictures instantly to the world. In total (in the first 13 hours), on Facebook, 35 million people worldwide had 80 million interactions with content related to the burning cathedral.
For journalists and news organisations rushing to report on the tragedy, this quickly became one of the biggest stories on their social channels in this or any other year. To analyse the impact, we used CrowdTangle, a social listening tool for public data, provided free to Facebook’s media partners.
Here are seven things that illuminate the scale of the social media response to Notre Dame:
1. France’s media saw an enormous spike in interactions after the fire at Notre Dame, according to CrowdTangle’s Intelligence tool
(based on 70 top French media pages, public interactions only)
2. A surge in Facebook Lives was one of the drivers
(again, based on 70 top French media pages, public interactions only)
3. The top Facebook page for interactions around Notre Dame was ABC News. The top French page was BFM TV (a 24-hour rolling news and weather channel based in France)
4. The top 10 Facebook posts by media (on any subject) in those initial 24 hours were all on Notre Dame
(based on a list of 9,000 global media accounts)
5. The #1 media post was this Facebook Live by Brut with more than 280,000 public interactions
6. On Instagram, the top news posts were by Le Monde (40x overperforming) and BBC News (more than 200,000 interactions)
(based on a list of 200 News accounts)
7. Finally, the top tweet mentioning Notre Dame was a video by AFP Journalist Patrick Galey (no longer available on his account). This was 10,000x overperforming, making it the most overperforming tweet by any news account in the CrowdTangle database this year
CrowdTangle measures only fully public posts, and tracks only interactions that are publicly visible on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter: Likes, Comments, Shares, Reactions, Video Views (Facebook), Likes, Comments, Video Views (Instagram), RTs, Likes, Video Views (Twitter).
For the purposes of this article “interactions” excludes video views, except where “video views” are clearly labelled.
James Morgan will be speaking at the upcoming GEN Summit in Athens on behalf of CrowdTangle/Facebook and he’ll be giving a masterclass: Get your tickets here.
Becky Pinnington is the trends data curator for Google News Lab, where her main focus is France. She is especially interested in data and interactive journalism covering pop culture.
James Morgan leads CrowdTangle’s strategy for News in Europe, Middle East and Africa. He joined Facebook from BBC News where he was a reporter and social editor.
Articles by Becky Pinnington and James Morgan edited by Alexandra Peng.
