Welcome to this week’s edition of The Labs Report, your one-stop, data-driven shop to quickly get up to speed on the most important and influential articles, stories and authors of the week.

We’re posting one day early this week since this Thursday is a holiday. Here’s what was trending on Twitter from June 27th to July 2nd, 2019.

The Five Most-Talked-About News Stories of the Week

  1. Donald Trump Jr. Shares, Then Deletes, a Tweet Questioning Kamala Harris’s Race | The New York Times
  2. Jimmy Carter suggests Trump is an illegitimate president | CNN
  3. Nike Nixes ‘Betsy Ross Flag’ Sneaker After Colin Kaepernick Intervenes | The Wall Street Journal
  4. Corroborating E. Jean Carroll | The New York Times
  5. Trump meets Kim Jong Un, becomes first sitting U.S. president to step into North Korea | NBC News

For the first time in a while, none of the week’s top stories centered around the ongoing immigration crisis. This dip in attention was likely spurred by the focus on a different series of Trump-related crises. In fact, of the five items in this week’s list, four were about the administration and/or members of the Trump family, and only one – a story about the President’s meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un – could be read as anything close to a positive development for the administration.

The 10 Most Influential Authors of the Week 

  1. CNN
  2. The New York Times
  3. The Washington Post
  4. Reuters Top News
  5. Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1)
  6. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC)
  7. Bloomberg
  8. NBC News
  9. MSNBC
  10. Ted Lieu (@tedlieu)

CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post took the top three spots in the week’s most influential authors list. Due to her focus on conditions within immigrant detention centers on the southern border, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was again featured in the top 10, while fellow Congressman Ted Lieu’s strident criticism of many different facets of the Trump administration saw him make this week’s list as well.

The Five Most Shared Tweets of the Week

Democratic politicians won the week in a landslide, authoring four of the five most-shared Tweets of the week. Two of these Tweets came from presidential candidates coming to a colleague’s defense over the week’s top story, while the fourth and fifth positions went to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as she continued to shine a light on living conditions in immigrant detention centers.

1. Cory Booker defends his peer (and competitor)

*Potentially offensive language is blurred in the above image.

2. Kellyanne Conway’s husband wants you to listen (and the Internet wants to know if he told his wife) 

3. Bernie throws a punch

4. AOC continues to keep tabs on the immigrant crisis…

5. … and reports back on successes to date

Want more data-driven insights while you wait for next week’s edition of The Labs Report? Read our analysis of the first two Democratic debates, download our latest special report, check out our Resource Center and get in touch with our team.

—

Methodology: The data which drives this series, provided by the Zignal Labs platform, is informed by a 10% sampling of Twitter activity around news stories published from June 27th to July 2nd, 2019. Stories are published by 25 of the most highly-read publications across the country (based on circulation data), including: ABC News, Bloomberg, The Boston Globe, CBS News, The Chicago Tribune, CNN, The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, Fox News, The Houston Chronicle, Huffington Post, The LA Times, MSNBC, NBC News, The New York Daily News, The New York Post, The New York Times, Newsday, Reuters, The Seattle Times, The Star Tribune, The Tampa Bay News, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
The “Top 5 Most-Talked-About Stories of the Week” are the five stories from the above-mentioned publications that received the most mentions across Twitter from June 27th to July 2nd, 2019, ranked by number of mentions from that date range.
The “Top 10 Most Influential Authors of the Week “ are the ten authors who saw the most engagement on Twitter around Tweets related to news stories published by the above-mentioned publications from June 27th to July 2nd, 2019, ranked by number of engagements from that date range.
The “Top Five Most Shared Tweets of the Week” are the five Tweets, related to news stories published by the above-mentioned publications from June 27th to July 2nd, 2019, that received the most Retweets, ranked by number of Retweets from that date range.