Prime Minister Narendra Modi is biggest newsmaker during COVID19

As COVID-19 created havoc in India and the world, political leaders, industries, and brands rose to the occasion to tackle the virus. An analysis of news headlines emanating out of India showed who occupied the centre-stage. There was emergence of old brands and new as they jostled to find space during this time.  

Dharma Media Consultants, a boutique brand-building company, in partnership with technology company, PRM Fincon, has released a report on how COVID-19 primarily occupied news space, with the major newsmakers emerging from Coronavirus-related news. We scanned 75,000 headlines across about 15 mainstream news sources using Artificial Intelligence techniques and identified, extracted, and classified the top newsmakers from each category. In the month-long data crunching exercise, the report shows the performance of brands which proffers valuable insights to corporates as they prepare to do business in a new world.   

We found that out of the total 75,000 headlines, 24.5% of headlines were related to COVID-19 in pre-Lockdown (from March 1), the number increased to 42.2% during Lockdown 1.0 and 2.0, and dropped slightly to 32% in Lockdown 3.0 (till May 10).  

The total number of COVID-19 headlines was 7,455 in Pre-Lockdown, it jumped to 16,505 in the height of the Lockdown period (1.0 and 2.0), and fell to 1,660 till the middle of Lockdown 3.0.  

Shutapa Paul, Founder, Dharma Media Consultants: “Our aim with this report was to find who and what were the newsmakers from before Lockdown 1.0 till Lockdown 3.0 induced by Coronavirus. The COVID-19 outbreak and its fallout are historic; and in these extraneous circumstances, the news cycles also projected unique findings. There were interesting findings in our month-long data crunching exercise with some surprises and a few news disrupters as well.” 

Rupesh Chaudhuri, Co-Founder, PRM Fincon: “Our contextual analysis engine, Xlrt, is capable of generating insights that end users can use for informed decision making. Using its AI engine, we were quickly able to identify the entities that were making the headlines across a variety of news sources and news categories.” 

The key highlights of the report are as follows: 

 The top trending news in the highlights include the news of the migrant labours issue in the COVID-19 fallout, followed by Tablighi Jamaat incident, which became India's worst coronavirus vector, along with the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) handling of the Coronavirus pandemic. The Tablighi Jamaat congregation saw the participation of over 3,000+ people including foreigners from Indonesia and Malaysia.