Tag Archives for lexis/nexis

The War On Happy Holidays

Feeling like writing something topical and funny, I thought I’d take on the War on Christmas by comparing newspaper references involving Kwanzaa, Hanukkah and Christmas during the first week of December. I went back almost 40 years, until I got bored with the scarcity of results (that far back you only find New York Times references while using the “Major U.S. Newspapers” search on LexisNexis.

Here’s the link to the Tableau version of the data I put together:

My Tableau chart based on holiday mentions in U.S. newspapers

I’m not entirely sure how I plan to use what I’ve got, but my general plan is to put together a Redshtick article where I discuss the War on Christmas and the collateral damage it has inflicted on innocent Kwanzaa. We’ll see how that goes. Enjoy!

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Black Friday In The News

I love LexisNexis. I’d just like to put that out there.

The academic version of the news search database helped me discover something interesting: Coverage of Black Friday hasn’t always been so extensive.

My original goal was to find out how many times Black Friday is mentioned in the week leading up to Thanksgiving, through the day after, versus how many times Afghanistan is mentioned during that same eight day period each year. Turned out that Afghanistan has a fairly steady figure (I expected it to steadily or suddenly decline over time as readers developed war fatigue) while Black Friday has soared from 10-30 stories per year to more than 100.

Dashboard 2

Link to a version of the chart which can be modified to display posts on Afghanistan, as well as to include or exclude years:
http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/BlackFridayCoverage/Dashboard2?:embed=y

Who knew loss leaders could be so much more interesting? And at which point will loss leaders eclipse combat losses for our national attention?