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Unemployment in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of unemployment news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about unemployment, jobless claims or unemployment benefits, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
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Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, unemployment took 24.55 of every 10,000 news articles in 2020, 2.52 times its 2019 share of 9.75 and the highest annual share between 2019 and 2025; by 2025 the share had fallen to 8.01, 17.8% below the 2019 level.
Basis: Annual unemployment articles (160,942 in all) divided by all articles in the index for the same year.
April 2020 was the month in which unemployment took its largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 49.67 articles per 10,000, 5.09 times the average share for 2019.
Basis: Monthly unemployment articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
Between January 2023 and July 2026, 13.75% of themed unemployment articles carried the theme of unemployment insurance benefits and claims, 908.92 times its frequency in all themed news.
Basis: Theme labels assigned to each article; lift against all themed news.
Of unemployment articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 63.9% were negative in tone, 1.9 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.6% of sampled articles carry a label.
Between January 2023 and July 2026, the news index's machine-assigned priority rating placed 73.4% of unemployment articles at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale), 1.72 times the 42.6% share for all news.
Basis: Top priority label per article; critical = priority of 7 or more.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 16,008 | 51.11% | 1.06 |
| India | 3,194 | 10.2% | 0.77 |
| United Kingdom | 1,139 | 3.64% | 0.62 |
| Nigeria | 1,118 | 3.57% | 2.61 |
| China | 1,072 | 3.42% | 1.3 |
| Australia | 854 | 2.73% | 1.27 |
| Canada | 588 | 1.88% | 0.87 |
| South Africa | 566 | 1.81% | 3.98 |
| Ghana | 540 | 1.72% | 3.58 |
| Brazil | 491 | 1.57% | 1.81 |
| France | 389 | 1.24% | 0.63 |
| Germany | 371 | 1.18% | 1.01 |
| New Zealand | 351 | 1.12% | 1.73 |
| Spain | 262 | 0.84% | 0.86 |
| Japan | 226 | 0.72% | 0.68 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "unemployment" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Unemployment in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/unemployment/