Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce summed up the last few weeks quite nicely.
"We are all coronavirus reporters now."
Indeed, once we hit publish on this one, 8 of our last 12 stories here at Nieman Lab have been about coronavirus and its effects on the news media industry in one way or another.
We now have data on what everyone was already probably thinking but didn’t want to say in the middle of a pandemic: Coronavirus has been great for traffic!
Parse.ly — the content analytics service used by lots of major news publishers — found that up to 15 percent of all daily traffic to their clients’ sites last week was to content about coronavirus.
March 12 was the day that several publishers saw a spike in online pageviews. That was the day after Donald Trump’s Oval Office address, the NBA suspending its season, and Tom Hanks coming down with the virus — all in about an hour’s time. It was also the day the NCAA canceled March Madness and the Dow had its biggest point loss ever (at least until an even deeper drop four days later).
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