2021’s biggest stories were covid-19 and America’s presidential transition

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

• THE FINALE: The Trump phenomenon, the biggest story of the campaign, comes to a dramatic conclusion
• Flashback 2016: The past year’s biggest local stories
• The 15 biggest career crashes of 2015
• Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is stepping down — here’s his incredible rags-to-riches story
• Warren Buffett is now the largest owner of 2 of the world’s biggest banks
• The 30 biggest media companies in the world
• Trump echoes Steve Bannon in raucous nationalist speech to the biggest conservative conference of the year
• Donald Trump’s new book perfectly embodies his presidential campaign, cover to cover
• Trump is quietly dismantling Obama’s biggest legacy
• The most bizarre tourist attractions in America
• The first sentence of Donald Trump’s new book nailed his presidential campaign
• Hillary Clinton’s biggest problem isn’t going away yet
• ‘Mexico is waking up’: The game has changed in North America
• I spent 3 months living in Alaska — here are the 7 things people always get wrong about America’s biggest state
• The 19 hottest female-founded startups of 2015
• [SHARE] From Zero To USD19 Billion: The True Story Behind WhatsApp And Its Founders
• The new Time magazine cover has a reality check for America
• ‘Zootopia’ has Disney’s biggest box office opening ever for an animated movie
• Here’s why the new Spider-Man is the best part of ‘Captain America: Civil War’
• The 25 most expensive elite boarding schools in America

2021’s biggest stories were covid-19 and America’s presidential transition have 421 words, post on www.economist.com at December 18, 2021. This is cached page on The Best Articles. If you want remove this page, please contact us.