How much news coverage will the upcoming U.S. presidential elections get relative to previous contests?

The short answer, not surprisingly, is probably a lot more than past seasons!

To try and understand how coverage has increased in recent memory I charted a sample set of data for the number of weekly stories about elections on Bloomberg back to 2007.

What’s interesting is that while the volume of political coverage has remained relatively steady, the spikes for each successive election are larger and larger.

Also, there is a near linear trajectory for presidential elections and the congressional mid-terms. Both increase steadily and also in proportion to one another.

A note about the data:  The numbers are weekly counts from a sub-set of the 175,000 sources carried on the Bloomberg professional system.