We use spaCy at work for (mostly) news articles as well. We've been pretty impressed with it overall for detecting larger trends using the NER models. I've been contemplating whether it might be useful to make a spaCy module that uses a Count-Min Sketch to track the top N of each of the NER categories partitioned on a daily (or weekly etc.) time.

Think it could be an interesting use case to get sort of similar results to Google's search trends.