On December 31, 2019, the first article about a novel lung disease in the Chinese city of Wuhan was published on SPIEGEL.de.
A short message that dozens of them appear on SPIEGEL.de every day.
And yet the coronavirus determined our lives in 2020 - and of course also dominated the news situation: SPIEGEL has not reported on any other topic so comprehensively and from so many perspectives.
Especially at the beginning of the pandemic, there was enormous reader interest: How should the situation be classified?
What is certain knowledge, what is a thesis, what is just a rumor?
The SPIEGEL website was visited up to 18 million times in a single day when Germany went into the first shutdown in March.
The journalists of SPIEGEL threw themselves into work.
In the 13th calendar week from March 23 to 29, 780 articles were published online, 450 of them relating to Covid-19, i.e. around 60 percent.
The dominance of the topic was also reflected on our magazine covers: The coronavirus or a related topic made it onto the cover 27 times - that's more than half of all editions - for the first time on February 1st.
Twelve more times Corona was not the main title, but took place small on the cover.
The cover story that is most read online dealt with two major topics of the year: Trump and Corona.
The article has been read around 77,000 times.
But there were other issues too.
At the beginning of the year, the effects of the climate catastrophe became apparent in the gigantic bush fires in Australia.
Later that year there was also a fire on the US east coast.
German domestic policy was determined by the election of Thomas Kemmerich (FDP) as Prime Minister of Thuringia with the votes of the AfD, who resigned after three days.
In addition, Philipp Amthor (with the lobby affair), Franziska Giffey (because of her doctoral thesis) and Lorenz Caffier (because of buying a weapon from a right-wing extremist) made negative headlines in German politics.
At the end of the year, the state government of Saxony-Anhalt caused a stir when it stopped the actually decided increase in the radio license fee.
In May there were demonstrations against racism and police violence in the USA, but also in Germany and in other countries.
The trigger: the violent death of the black American George Floyd by a white police officer.
"I can't breathe," Floyd had kept saying when the cop held his knee on the back of his neck for more than eight minutes.
These curves show when which topics came up in SPIEGEL reporting and when they disappeared again:
The autumn was dominated by the bitter US election campaign.
Will Donald Trump stay in the White House or can Democrat Joe Biden prevail?
The counting of votes dragged on for days until it was clear: Joe Biden will be the 46th President of the USA.
methodology
Where does the data come from? Up arrow Down arrow
The data for this analysis come from our content management system, which we use to publish our articles on SPIEGEL.de.
As of December 22, 2020, there are more than 52,000 entries for 2020 - including videos, picture galleries and podcasts or articles in foreign languages.
We only included German texts in our analysis, i.e. more than 37,500 individual articles.
Of these, around 13,800 articles were so-called author's pieces, i.e. texts that have one or more authors.
These articles are mostly longer and therefore more complex pieces.
The majority of the database therefore consists of articles without authors, these are mostly reports that we have taken over from news agencies.
Of course, not all reports and articles make it onto the SPIEGEL.de homepage, so the majority of our readers only actually get to see some of our published pieces.
To map the reach of SPIEGEL.de, we used the freely accessible figures of the IVW (information community for determining the distribution of advertising media) as of December 20, 2020.
In the area of online media, the IVW uses counting pixels to determine the total number of page views and the individual related usage processes (visits) of web offers.
In our graphic we show the visits on a daily basis. In order to measure the interest of our readers in individual articles, we also used figures from our analytics tool from Adobe.
Only access to online articles on SPIEGEL.de is recorded.
How were the articles assigned to the topics? Up arrow Down arrow
In order to identify the individual topics in the texts, we have automatically evaluated our publications.
In doing so, we mainly included certain terms in the headline and introtext.
This means that articles are counted multiple times for different categories if they contain several relevant terms.
It is also possible that we have overlooked individual texts, but this does not change the overall picture.
Despite or perhaps because the topics of Corona and the US election were so dominant, it is worth looking at the other topics of the year.
For more than 100 other subject areas, you will find here when they determined the news on SPIEGEL.de:
Behind these elections, scandals and all the other issues are people.
Our readers tell us that they particularly like the interview format, in which they talk not about but with the protagonists of our stories.
We published more than 1,300 interviews this year on SPIEGEL.de.
We evaluated who we spoke to.
The result: men are still much more likely to have their say than women in the interviews.
Unfortunately, this is also the case in other texts and has led us to discuss why this is and how the visibility of women in reporting can be increased.
2020 was also a year of farewell.
The SPD politician Thomas Oppermann, the American constitutional judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the basketball player Kobe Bryant and Asterix illustrator Albert Uderzo are just a few of the well-known personalities who died this year.
In this graphic you can find all the people about whom we published obituaries in the printed SPIEGEL, with links to our online articles, of course:
What remains of 2020, this extraordinary year?
For us it is the realization that we are all looking for answers, classifications and explanations in uncertain and turbulent times.
We hope that you, dear readers, will perceive us as a reliable partner in 2021 as well, and we wish you and us that we can compile a review with more positive topics for you at the end of next year.
Icon: The mirror
Collaboration: Marcel Pauly, Patrick Stotz