Definitions for “Three Categories of News: Bread and Butter Issues, Major Headlines, and Third Strand Stories”

In our recent analysis, we examined Tweets about President Trump and Joe Biden from January through April and found a mix of three categories: bread and butter issues, major headlines, and third strand stories. Bread and butter issues are topics that affect people’s everyday lives, so they talk about them whether they are in the news or not. Major headlines are those big stories that capture and hold significant amounts of attention rapidly after breaking into the news. Third strand stories do not reach the prominence of the major stories rapidly, but they could linger over time with an ebb and flow of attention and impact.

Here’s an example of major headlines and third strand stories:

The Wall Street Journal ran an article on March 18, 2020, titled Hospitals Facing Coronavirus Are Running Out of Masks, Other Key Equipment. The New York Times also had an in-depth article on personal protective equipment the next day, March 19, 2020. The story ran under the banner At War With No Ammo: Doctors Say Shortage of Protective Gear Is Dire. These stories generate a lot of interest almost immediately, based on their topics, when they first appear in the media and for several days after. Interest can be measured by the volume of searches their topics generate online and spikes in searches. Google Trends quantifies the interest through a trend index (0 – no interest, 100 – maximum interest in the search topic for the time and location of the search). The figure below shows the search trends for Personal Protective Equipment between January 1 and May 31, 2020. The search interest spikes and reaches the maximum possible on March 19, 2020, soon after major outlets report on the topic.

Now compare this to searches on Tara Reade during the same period in the figure below. The story broke during an interview with the host of a community radio station on March 25, 2020. Two days after, the Google Trends index reached its maximum of 47, fell from there to a low of 5 by a month later, and started picking up again on April 24. It is this pattern of low or medium levels of interest in a story, and for days or weeks after it appears in the news media, that makes it a third strand issue.