These are the top maybe-not headlines from the past 36-hours presented by The Conversation Project from raw engagement data from our social media to the headlines posted over the past day.
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The 8 topics that our followers ranked as the most conversational are:
MANHATTAN ER DOC LORNA BREEN COMMITS SUICIDE, SHAKEN BY CORONAVIRUS
The head of the emergency department at a Manhattan hospital committed suicide after spending days on the front lines of the coronavirus battle, her family said Monday. Dr. Philip Breen told the New York Times of his physician daughter, Dr. Lorna Breen, who had been medical director of the New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital amid the pandemic. The battle-weary ER doctor, 49, was only the latest city healthcare worker to take her own life. Two days earlier, a Bronx EMT witnessing the virus’s ruthless toll fatally shot himself with a gun belonging to his retired NYPD cop dad. Tragic rookie paramedic John Mondello, 23, worked out of EMS Station 18 in The Bronx, which handles one of the biggest 911 call volumes in the city. Lorna died Sunday in Charlottesville, Va., where she’d been staying with her family, the father told the Times. Philip Breen said his daughter had gotten sick with the virus while on the job at one point, but then returned to work after about a week and a half of recuperating. Still, the hospital sent her home again, and her family brought her to Virginia.
COMMENTARY: The stress is overwhelming, and especially hard on the people who are battling the epidemic directly and trying to stay healthy at the same time. Don’t let ‘check-in fatigue’ set in. Take a moment to check in on more people as this weirdness stretches.
[SOURCE: nypost.com]
RUSSIA CORONAVIRUS CASES OVERTAKE CHINA AS VLADIMIR PUTIN FACES SHARP RISE IN INFECTIONS
Russia has now reported more confirmed coronavirus cases than China, having reached a total of 87,147 infections nationwide. According to state news agency Tass, Russia confirmed an additional 6,198 cases over the past 24 hours. Another 50 people died in Russia over the past day, bringing the death toll to 794. Russia’s anti-coronavirus crisis center announced the new figures on Monday, noting that 43.4 percent of newly identified patients were asymptomatic. The crisis center also said that the daily growth in cases in Russia has slowed to 7.66 percent. Russia now has the ninth highest number of confirmed cases in the world, according to Johns Hopkins University. China—where the virus originated—sits in tenth with 83,912 confirmed cases and 4,637 deaths, though the international media and other nations have cast doubt on the relatively low figures. The number of confirmed cases has quickly risen in the country, effectively doubling in the space of eight days. Back on April 19, the country had confirmed 42,000 infections, according to Worldometer. The jump in infections has occurred despite Russia implementing tough lockdown measures throughout the majority of the country at the end of March.
COMMENTARY: It is hard to trust any information out of Russia, but this seems to be the universal truth with COVID-19. The more you try to convince the world you’ve got everything under control, the less control you probably have.
[SOURCE: newsweek.com]
LAMAR JACKSON HAS SIGNED WITH THE NEW YORK JETS AND WE ARE NOT JOKING
New York Jets fans, get excited: Lamar Jackson has joined your team! This is a verifiably true statement injected with zero satire or parody. It is factual. A football-playing human person named Lamar Jackson has signed with Gang Green, period. Unfortunately, he’s not the reigning NFL MVP you’re thinking of. He’s an undrafted rookie free agent cornerback out of Nebraska. Still, though, 30 NFL teams cannot claim that Lamar Jackson plays for them. The Jets can! An All-Big Ten Second Team selection in 2019, Jackson was a three-year starter for the Cornhuskers. He was at his best as a senior, picking off three passes and breaking up 15, adding two forced fumbles and a fumble recovery. On top of it all, he has really good size for a corner at 6-2 and 208 pounds.
COMMENTARY: All jokes aside, the return of football and the agony of suffering through a season of your hometown team underperforming is a wanted agondy right now. Good luck to the J-E-T-S-JETS-JETS-JETS, and the other 32 teams in the NFL to get back to work and get us all back to distraction again.
[SOURCE: 12up.com]
CORONAVIRUS COULD PUSH CONSUMERS AWAY FROM INFLUENCERS AND TOWARD STREAMING TV
As the nation struggles with a pandemic and economic uncertainty, fundamental shifts in consumer habits are leading marketers to rethink existing strategies and budgets allocated to influencers and streaming TV. These significant shifts are nothing new; just as the dot-com bubble reduced landline penetration and boosted mobile phone adoption, the last recession pushed traditional ad spend to digital. It was an option before, but the recession accelerated the trend to targeting select audiences on social media platforms, giving rise to influencers. Today, social media influencers are so ubiquitous, they risk becoming meaningless. Prior to the onset of coronavirus, we saw the influencer trend diminishing while the streaming TV trend became more prominent. Today, streaming is still trending up and influencers have actually seen increased levels of engagement, but they face credibility issues, which could lead to a reduction in perceived value to brands. Streaming has similar, if not more, targeting capabilities as social media, but now it has the eyeballs — the captive audience of quarantined Americans — up 20% this March, according to Nielsen. Marketers on a tight budget will be forced to reevaluate their relationships with influencers as they seek to increase ad spend on streaming TV services.
COMMENTARY: As a person who creates streaming content this is exceptionally good news. It also means the gig is up for people sleeping on the trend of streaming programing and might as well be a potential gold rush on it wat to a bubble. Then the influencers might fight back, even if they don’t seem to do very much in the way of anything.
[SOURCE: techcrunch.com]
CORONAVIRUS: GENERAL MOTORS SUSPENDS DIVIDEND TO PRESERVE CASH AS OUTBREAK DISRUPTS PRODUCTION
General Motors said Monday it is suspending its quarterly dividend and stock buybacks to preserve cash as the coronavirus pandemic has left factories and auto dealerships at least partially closed across the U.S. In addition to cutting the dividend, which paid $1.52 a share annually, GM has “taken other significant austerity measures to preserve near-term available cash,” the company said in a statement. The automaker also extended a $3.6 billion, three-year revolving credit facility to April 2022 to help bolster its liquidity. Shares of GM were down about 2% to $21.47 during premarket trading Monday. The stock is down 40% this year. GM’s U.S. plants have been shuttered since mid-March due to the Covid-19 outbreak sweeping across the U.S. The automaker, along with Ford Motor and Fiat Chrysler, are in discussions with the United Auto Workers union to reopen the plants, but union leaders said last week they oppose restarting production in early May announced by several automakers. GM and Ford are among the only major automakers that have yet to announce a time frame to restart production. Fiat Chrysler earlier this month announced plans to restart production in a week.
COMMENTARY: This article is full of numbers and percentages to tell the story of how automakers are being decimated with the downturn in the economy. Not very well, as one might expect, even without all the numbers to back the data.
[SOURCE: cnbc.com]
FOX NEWS CUTS TIES WITH DIAMOND & SILK, UNOFFICIAL TRUMP ‘ADVISERS’ WHO SPREAD BONKERS CORONAVIRUS CLAIMS
Fox News has cut ties with MAGA vlogging superstars Diamond & Silk, who had contributed original content to the network’s streaming service Fox Nation since shortly after its late 2018 launch. The sudden split comes after the Trump-boosting siblings have come under fire for promoting conspiracy theories and disinformation about the coronavirus. “After what they’ve said and tweeted you won’t be seeing them on Fox Nation or Fox News anytime soon,” a source with knowledge of the matter told The Daily Beast. After rising to prominence during the 2016 election, Lynette “Diamond” Hardaway and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson leveraged their newfound celebrity into regular sycophantic appearances on Fox News, resulting in President Donald Trump raving about their performances, featuring them at rallies, and treating them as “senior advisers.” The social-media personalities were eventually tapped to provide weekly videos for Fox Nation after it launched as a subscription-based online video network. Their episodes, essentially 5-7 minute distillations of their freeform live-streams, appeared like clockwork on the streaming service until earlier this month. No new episodes of their online program have been uploaded since April 7, as CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy first noted over the weekend. Prior to this month, the duo never missed a week posting episodes since December 2018. Diamond & Silk have used their heavy social-media presence to be at the forefront of right-wing misinformation about the COVID-19 outbreak. For instance, during their March 30 livestream, the duo claimed that the number of American coronavirus deaths has been inflated to make Trump look bad.
COMMENTARY: There is comedy, and there is buffoonery, and Diamond and Silk (in the opinion of this 40-ish-yer-old Conservative Black dude) it buffoonery to the nth degree. Now that their stardom has seemed to have vanished, we’ll see if there is a real reckoning to come, and if any sort of cultural mea culpa is needed to get their invitations back to the barbeque.
[SOURCE: thedailybeast.com]
HOWARD STERN QUESTIONS WHO WOULD VOTE FOR TRUMP AFTER DISINFECTANT REMARKS
Howard Stern on Monday said he will support Joe Biden for the 2020 presidential election. The SiriusXM host made the comment while taking a call from a Donald Trump supporter in New York who defended the president’s Thursday remarks about ingesting disinfectant to kill the novel coronavirus. Trump, after being skewered in the media, walked the comment back Friday, saying he was being “sarcastic.” Stern’s caller used the “sarcastic” line when defending Trump. Stern, a onetime friend of Trump’s who had him on his show a number of times before he sought political office, was baffled. Stern suggested Trump supporters hold a large rally where they all drink disinfectant “and all drop dead.” The caller told Stern he was biased because he would likely support Biden, to which Stern said, “I am all in on Joe Biden. You see the wall that’s right next to you, I’ll vote for the wall over a guy who tells me that I should pour Clorox into my mouth. Listen, I think we are in deep s***. I think we could have been ahead of this curve.” Stern finally had to hang up on the caller. “I just can’t take it,” he said. “I don’t know what is going on in our country.”
COMMENTARY: Howard Stern is a guy that gets what motivates Donald Trump and how to leverage it for his own gains. He also is a man mired in reality and can see just how bonkers a world with Trump as President of the United States is becoming. Whether his lukewarm endorsement of Joe Biden means anything or not, he is willing to speak out against his friend as continuing the job of President.
[SOURCE: msn.com]
LOUISIANA POLICE OFFICER FATALLY SHOT, ANOTHER CRITICALLY INJURED IN STANDOFF WITH SUSPECT
A four-hour standoff with a homicide suspect in Louisiana left one police officer dead and another critically injured, Baton Rouge Chief Murphy Paul said in a news briefing Sunday. A 21-year veteran of the police department was killed in the shooting and a seven year veteran is in the hospital “fighting for his life,” Paul said. The two officers are not being identified, Paul said. The incident began at 9:30 a.m. Sunday when the officers responded to a home after receiving a tip that a suspect was hiding at that location. Paul said the suspect was believed to have been involved in a homicide that happened earlier that morning. The suspect fired on the officers while they were checking the scene, Paul said. The two officers were hit and taken to a local hospital. The four-hour standoff ended with the suspect surrendering and being taken into custody. He will be booked on the appropriate charges, Paul said.
COMMENTARY: This is a sad event to report. We offer up thoughts to the all the families involved with this incident and will make sure to update this story as needed.
[SOURCE: cnn.com]
Eight Things To Talk About uses the raw engagement data from the social media engagement from The Conversation Project to generate the top-ranking headlines over the course of the past day.
A full weeks’ data (from Friday to Friday) is compiled, weighed, and sorted to produce the content for the Weekly Wrap-Up with J Cleveland Payne, published every Saturday as a podcast available at ThisIsTheConversation.com or wherever your favorite podcasts are found.
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