Who won the eclipse?
I can't wait to do this again in 2317.
Welcome back to Lost in Panther City! For this edition of Fort Worth’s favorite newsletter, I have a short follow-up on my previous coverage of other people’s coverage of the eclipse. Who had the best coverage? Who had the worst? Who had the most? I will probably answer at least one of these questions.
I also made the dubious decision to attend America’s worst rodeo earlier this week and boy was it a depressing time. More on that soon: I’m working on a post for next week about my experience, but for now here’s a picture of me trying to be inconspicuous in the Cowtown Coliseum:
Also, a reminder: This newsletter is a small operation but also has no marketing budget. The only reason anyone besides my mom reads it (thank you, mother) is because enthusiastic readers have spread the word. I’ve got a lot of interesting things planned, including some deep-dive historical pieces of the kind that I haven’t done in a while. So please share Lost in Panther City and praise it publicly with hyperbolic enthusiasm (even if you have to fake it).
Back in March, I lightly roasted the Dallas Morning News for its extensive — some might say, excessive — coverage in the lead-up to this month’s total solar eclipse:
The newspaper hosted an Instagram live event about the eclipse in February, and it is organizing another in-person event later this month. It also launched a newsletter about the eclipse; set up a dedicated page for coverage of the eclipse; curated a playlist of songs tangentially related to the eclipse; and has a literal countdown timer plastered atop its homepage that somehow also follows you no matter where you go on the website — a ticking clock that haunts you even when you’re trying to read about non-eclipse related news. The eclipse countdown is always there.
Now that the eclipse has come and gone — and seeing as how we’re all still alive, having avoided all the end-of-the-world predictions your crazy QAnon uncle was posting on Facebook — I decided it was only fair to do a follow-up. My original post was written several weeks before totality so perhaps it was unfair to crown the DMN as king of eclipse coverage so prematurely. Plenty of other local news outlets ramped up their reporting in late March and early April. They deserve attention too!
So let’s see what the final tally was. According to the Lost in Panther City data analysis team, these were the total number of original eclipse-related stories published by each news outlet since November 2023:
Dallas Morning News: 102
NBC DFW: 89
Fox 4: 72
WFAA: 43
KERA: 18
Dallas Observer: 13
D Magazine: 5
Lost in Panther City: 2
(Some caveats: Like last time, I tried to avoid counting wire stories or things that clearly weren’t produced by local reporters. So if our NBC affiliate ran a national story about the eclipse from NBC News, I didn’t count it. Also just remember that this is a very unscientific count done entirely for my amusement so it may not be perfect. But it’s close enough.)
My initial count turned out to be a surprisingly accurate predictor of how the coverage continued to play out. The bottom of the rankings shifted a bit, but while our local NBC station churned out an astronomical number of stories in the days leading up to the eclipse, they just couldn’t quite compete with the intensity and dedication of the DMN. The newspaper put out an astonishing 38 separate posts on the day of the eclipse (though this number includes several previously published stories with updated timestamps so they’d appear more current).
This doesn’t, of course, say anything about the quality of each outlet’s eclipse reporting. I’ll be honest, I did not read every single story. But here are some half-formed observations based on my skimming:
Fox 4 published not one but two stories about the “world's largest edible Moon Pie” being served in Irving during the eclipse. WFAA published six variations of “What time is the eclipse?” in a blatant attempt to boost traffic. (Boo.) The Star-Telegram let Mac Engel write a goofy column that tried and mostly failed to say something about American consumerism but was full of blistering rhetorical grenades like this one:
There was something else here that required protective eye wear: porta potties. You can look up, but looking down can cause permanent damage.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I feel a little bad about picking on the Dallas Morning News last time around because everyone deserves to be roasted at least a little for their eclipse coverage. (I want to emphasize that this includes me: I milked this thing for two easy Lost in Panther City columns.)
Still, the DMN, appropriately, got the final word with a story published just yesterday about the entirely unexpected fact that a lot of people weren’t in the office last Monday, having apparently stayed home to watch totality:
Where office occupancy typically ranged between 56% and 61% in the Dallas area during March, eclipse day saw a steep drop-off. Occupancy slipped to 40.9% in Dallas on April 8, and quickly rebounded to 66.3% by the next day.
If journalism — not to mention humanity itself — is still around in 2317, I’m sure North Texas residents will endure a similar media blitz during the next eclipse. But until then, I hope you all had at least a little bit of awe and wonder during this totality. You deserve it.