The Biggest News of 2022 Measured by Font Size

For the last couple years, I’ve been keeping track of the font size of the headlines on cnn.com

Why, you ask? Why not?

If you haven’t noticed, cnn.com adjusts the font size of their headline based on how newsworthy the article is.

So naturally I setup a bot that checks the font size of the cnn.com headline every hour. I also did this last year, if you haven’t seen it. Since it’s near the end of the year, I thought it would be a good time to look at the results and see what they tell us, if anything

Without further ado, here is the chart of CNN font sizes for 2022:

Hover over the bars above to see the largest headline for each day of 2022. You can click the blue bars to go to the news story related to the headline.

This chart shows the probability of a certain headline font size. So you can see there’s about a 50% chance the font size will be between 36-40px and a 50% chance it will be a larger headline. In other words, there was a 50/50 chance of a big news story on any given day in 2022. This is actually more moderate than last year, where there was a 64% of a big news story on any given day.

Here’s a few highlights

Headline with the biggest font size

One Year Later (Jan 6th - 107px)

This headline marked the 1 year anniversary of the US capital insurrection

Other big headlines

JUSTICE JACKSON (Jun 30th - 102px)

Jackson Confirmed (April 7th - 95px)

GOP WINS THE HOUSE (Nov 16th - 95px)

Democrats defy history (Nov 9th - 93px)

Justice Breyer to retire (Jan 6th - 86px)

Russia Steps up onslaught (Mar 3rd - 86px)

The King’s first message (Sept 9th - 86px)

‘We failed these children’ (May 29th - 78px)

QUEEN ELIZABETH DEAD AT 96 (Sept 8th - 72px)

Couple observations

• It’s notable what happened between Feb 24th and April 4th. Every day between these dates there was a large headline referring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This seemingly defied the “24-hour news cycle” trope for months. I’m not exactly sure what was so special about April 4th and why the news stopped giving it as much attention.
• There was a similar “string of large headlines” between May 25th and May 30th regarding the Uvalde elementary school shooting, which predictably petered off with no new laws passed.
• It’s interesting that the headline referring to the King’s response to the Queen’s death had a larger font size than the announcement headline itself.
• There were 3 large headlines referring to the new Supreme Court justice, spaced months apart throughout the year; one regarding the previous justice’s retirement, another regarding the next justice’s confirmation, and another regarding her swearing in.