GDP up 3.5 Percent in third quarter

The economy growing again and The Washington Post thought this good enough to be breaking news. Also note that the official announcement would not be until noon, and they were telling the world at 8:32 a.m.

News Alert
08:32 AM EDT Thursday, October 29, 2009

GDP rises at an annual rate of 3.5 percent in the third quarter

The Commerce Department reports that economic activity increased at an annual rate of 3.5 percent in the third quarter of 2009.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com - http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/ZTVJ68/MXQ3Q/WBQWKV/QH68J8/9WSOE/50/t

Finding a good search phrase is something of a problem. TweetVolume produced these results for the phrases I tried.

I used Archivist to search for GDP rises, GDP up, and GDP US.

The searches found many tweets before October 29 when The Post announced the increase in GDP. GDP U.S. is a much more general phrase than the other two, and it produced many more tweets than the other two even when looking at only the messages from the 29th. When I checked the GDP U.S. tweets they seemed to be about the third quarter GDP numbers -- those before 8:30 a.m. discussing the prospect of a rise. I am going to start with all three to see what happens.

I stopped searching on November 1, 2009. At that point 1479 messages had been found for gdp-us with fewer for the others. The final timeline was

The .txt files that can be read by Excel to acquire the data are: gdp rises.txt, gdp up.txt, and gdp us.txt