The day without news - News Recap 2021

Intuitively, you can probably confirm that less news is published on weekends. But do you also have a guess on which day of the week the most articles are published online? And what was the effect of the summer slump in 2021? Are fewer articles really published in the summer? And why was October 23, 2021 so special? This report takes a look back at the news year 2021 and highlights striking points in the course of the year.

Do you remember what you did on October 23, 2021? You probably didn't read much news. Because in fact, the publishers we examined published very few articles on that day. That's not atypical for a Saturday as far as it goes. After all, Saturdays were when the volume of articles was at its lowest in 2021. However, there were conspicuously few new publications on this particular Saturday, with only 80 articles. Relatively few articles are published on Sundays, too, because fewer people work on weekends and fewer press releases are published, for example. Incidentally, most articles were published on Wednesdays in 2021. With an average of 203 articles per publisher, that's a whopping 56% more than on Saturdays and more than 2.5 times as many as on Oct. 23.

We at azernis have analyzed the news year 2021 in a data-driven manner and evaluated the publications of six German publishers. We deliberately chose the six publishers we analyzed. They include Tagesschau.de, a public service publisher with national significance, and BR24, a successful regional news service. t-online.de is there as a representative of the boulevard. They are joined by Spiegel.de, Zeit.de and FAZ.de, which were chosen for their socially liberal and conservative reputations, respectively.

We will carry out further analyses for these publishers. We will start here with the annual review of 2021, which is shown in the next graphic, where the number of articles per day over the entire year is displayed. For better orientation, a running average has also been added to make trends more visible.

The waviness of the light line is due to weekends. As already explained, less is published on weekends. But also on holidays, especially in December, the volume of articles drops very sharply. On the whole, however, there has always been a certain basic volume of articles, which has only rarely been exceeded or fallen short of.

The first major dip in the number of publications occurred in early April. April 1 was Maundy Thursday. This is followed by Good Friday and the Easter holiday. Shortly before that, on 25.03, there was a temporary peak in articles. The events surrounding the Easter break, which was first announced because of the pandemic and then withdrawn, had caused a visible surge in the volume of articles.

Our data shows that the summer slump in 2021 was not very pronounced. Only August saw a significant drop in articles. Due to the Corona pandemic and the Bundestag election in the fall, there was always newsworthy news, so the summer slump was only slightly apparent.

On September 26, the Bundestag elections took place. As expected, this was accompanied by a large media echo. On September 27, the Monday after the election, the most articles were registered by 2021. Each of the six publishers published an average of 228 articles on this Monday. And the Saturday before the election, as well as Election Sunday itself, also saw an unusually high volume of articles for a weekend.

Then, in October, something happens that we would not have expected and was an absolute surprise for us. On Saturday, October 23, there is an extreme outlier in the data. On this weekend very few articles were registered. At first we thought there was a bug in our software or a server failure. But in fact, October 23 was the day without news in 2021. If you look at the Tagesschau archives for this day, you will see that there were simply very few reports and simply nothing newsworthy. We definitely would not have expected such extreme downward swings before the analysis.

After this weekend, however, the volume of articles is increasing again. This can be explained, on the one hand, by rising Corona case numbers and, on the other hand, by progress in the negotiations to form a government. On November 25, another peak was reached. On this day, there was a great deal of news with high relevance. For example, the then new corona mutation Omicron was discovered in South Africa. In addition, Biontech's vaccine for children was approved and the cabinet of the new government was presented after the Greens were able to settle their internal dispute.

After November 25, the number of articles steadily decreases, carried by the December holidays, so that the year 2021 ends with few news articles.

That was the news year 2021. In particular, the holidays and special events such as the Bundestag elections shaped the year. However, there were also days away from major media events when a very large number of articles were published. For example, in March and November. At the same time, some weekends in particular were also very uneventful. The summer slump was not very pronounced in 2021. Due to the federal election and the pandemic, there was always a certain minimum number of news articles, which was only undercut on the now famous October 23.