One of the interesting and little noticed consequences of the rush by financial journalists to write about the coronavirus is the decline in coverage of companies.

It’s a seismic shift that can be illustrated by looking at the historical volumes of news coverage for the benchmarks: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google (Alphabet).

To illustrate the change, I pulled data from Bloomberg showing the daily average volume of news stories in 2020 is down 19% for Apple, 23% for Alphabet, 19% for Facebook, 24% for Amazon and a whopping 70% for Netflix.

Its a reminder that even in a digital world unconstrained by the limitations of print, there are a finite number of reporters and they cannot be everywhere.

I’m not sure that the declines for the FAANGs matter. The coverage of Apple is still more than anyone can absorb. One could argue the companies were “over-covered” before.

But for many smaller companies, which get scant coverage to begin with, the reduction could be significant.

(Note: Bloomberg data on news flow includes articles from 175,000 news and social media sources.)