Welcome to the NewsWhip Daily spotlight round-up for the week of April 11th. This week, Elon Musk’s Twitter stunt continues, and Kinder products face a recall before Easter.
If you’d like to subscribe to the newsletter itself, you can do that here.
Apr 11th: Elon Musk declines to join Twitter’s board
In an abrupt reversal, Twitter’s CEO Parag Agrawal announced late last night that Elon Musk would not be joining Twitter’s board after all, less than a week after originally announcing that he would be.
In the intervening time, this has received a lot of media attention, with more than 4k articles written since midnight this morning about the subject. This has yet to be matched by public interest though, with just 144k interactions today so far, compared to millions on the day the announcement was originally made.
Apr 12th: The top stories about inflation
Though some aspects of today’s numbers came in slightly lower than expected in the US, it has been a blockbuster year for inflation, which has been a big subject of discussion for some time now. In the last month alone, there have been more than 100k articles written about the subject amounting to some 8.5 million engagements.
Below is a chart showing the top ten articles about inflation within that time, ranked by engagements.
The top articles were a mix of politics and about specific inflation challenges such as gas prices. The top article overall came from Common Dreams, referring to the more than 80% of people that believe inflation is driven by companies ‘jacking up prices’ while still making record profits.
Apr 13th: Kinder products face recall due to salmonella
As we approach Easter and an increase in chocolate consumption for many around the world, Kinder is facing a recall crisis due to the detection of salmonella in some of its products.Â
Unlike many product recalls, this has been a multi-day narrative for the chocolate brand, beginning on April 2nd and continuing more than a week to still be talked about as of this morning.
It has also been an international narrative, with waves of coverage in different countries. Several Australian publications were among the most engaged, with news of the recall and a hospitalized girl, while the BBC reported on a factory closure off the back of the recalls.Â
Apr 14th: CNN’s streaming service faces loss in investment
CNN officially launched its subscription streaming service, CNN+, on March 29th, but investments and projections are expected to be cut substantially due to a low adoption rate two weeks after its debut.Â
The news, first reported by Axios on April 12th, has since caused a stir online, with 342k engagements to articles written about CNN+ in the last two days.Â
The topic has gained the most interest among conservative publishers, with most of the articles focusing on the loss in investment, while the Conservative Brief highlighted how the cuts will affect Chris Wallace, the former host of Fox News Sunday who made the move to CNN.
Apr 15th: Elon Musk’s Twitter bid dominates headlines
In just 10 days Elon Musk has moved from securing his spot on Twitter’s board of directors, to reversing his decision to join, to ultimately offering to buy out the social media platform in $43 billion cash. Although it isn’t clear if this is the end of his circuslike stunt.Â
News about Musk’s Twitter bid is quickly making waves online, with engagements to the 6.9k articles already surpassing the amount of interest the prior announcement about him joining the board of directors received.Â
There have been 3.29M engagements to articles about Musk’s offer in the last day, and hundreds of articles are still being published this morning as the situation continues to unfold.Â
That’s all for this week, but don’t forget you can subscribe to the NewsWhip Daily to receive the top predicted stories of the morning and every spotlight delivered straight to your inbox.
