B Y ONE MEASURE the covid-19 pandemic is the biggest story of the past 75 years. In 2020 nearly half of articles in The Economist mentioned it, the highest share for a single subject since the second world war. This year news consumers' attention shifted to a wider array of issues. Yet according to Chartbeat, a firm that measures online readership, covid still held the public's interest more steadily than any other topic. The Economist today Handpicked stories, in your inbox A daily newsletter with the best of our journalism Sign up Chartbeat tracks how many hours audiences spend on each story published by 7,000 news sites, mostly in English-speaking countries. We have calculated the total reading time for articles covering 45 events in 2021. Whereas interest in other topics tended to surge and fade, covid commanded constant attention. Stories about vaccines amassed 43m of the 275m total hours; those on the leading variants of the SARS – C o V -2 virus got a further 27m. The only subject whose total readership rivalled covid's was America's presidential transition. It yielded three spikes in interest, set off by the riot at the Capitol building, Joe Biden's inauguration and Donald Trump's… Read full this story
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