Poynter’s newsroom had a lot to cover in 2023. Here’s a look back at our top stories for the year by engaged minutes, the total number of minutes that all visitors spent actively interacting with a story.

1. A reporter made sure a retired police chief’s death didn’t go uncovered. Then social media attacked her.

After retired police chief Andreas Probst was killed in a hit-and-run, Las Vegas Review-Journal crime reporter Sabrina Schnur reported on the accident, wrote an obituary for Probst and kept reporting on the story when a source came forward with a video showing the collision was intentional.

When that video went viral, social media users shared screenshots of the obituary, which used the phrase “bike crash” to describe the death before the evidence shown in the video was known. Billionaire Elon Musk chimed in too, pointing to a lack of “media outrage” about Probst’s death. An onslaught of harassment followed, much of which was individually directed at Schnur.

Schnur and Review-Journal executive editor Glenn Cook spoke to media business reporter Angela Fu about the flood of vitriol and the newsroom’s response to the harassment. “I’m not going to stop writing because some people on Twitter are upset,” Schnur told Poynter.

The harassment took on extra meaning as it coincided with the one-year anniversary of Review-Journal reporter Jeff German’s killing, allegedly at the hands of a public official he was covering. “We know firsthand that social media vitriol can turn into something worse,” Cook said.

2. Covering the possible causes and diagnoses of Damar Hamlin’s injury

When Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field during a January game between the Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals, misinformation pointing to the COVID-19 vaccine as the cause proliferated online. In the aftermath, news outlets tangled with how much to describe the potential medical causes of the collapse accurately without leading viewers astray.

In an article written the next day, former Poynter faculty Al Tompkins urged journalists to pay attention to word choice when describing Hamlin’s condition, going into HIPAA laws and American Hospital Association explanations for terms like “critical” and “fair” to describe a patient’s status.

“This is a time when journalists should be careful about the words they use to describe Damar Hamlin’s condition,” Tompkins wrote.

3. The Buffalo News was the crown jewel of Warren Buffett’s news empire. Now it’s just another Lee paper

Fu spent months on this enterprise piece about cuts at The Buffalo News, the first daily newspaper Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway purchased as he began to build his news empire. In the years since, as the news industry became destabilized, Buffett became disenchanted with newspaper ownership and sold The Buffalo News and his other 31 daily newspapers to Lee Enterprises in 2020.

Staffers at The Buffalo News told Poynter that Lee cut budgets, pushed out veteran reporters and outsourced its design and print production cutbacks, a shock to the system after the paper had long been spared the worst of the industry’s decline.

“We were feeling pretty, I think, encouraged overall about the future,” Buffalo News enterprise reporter Mark Sommer told Fu. “And then to have all of this happen suddenly, it’s like a dose of reality or a blast of cold water on us, where suddenly the rosier outlook we were hoping to believe in came to a crashing halt.”

4. Why one firefighter is calling out Maui wildfire conspiracy theories

As wildfires in Maui devastated the island earlier this year, conspiracy theories about the “real” cause of the fires began to spread online, with one leading theory suggesting it was giant lasers used in a “direct energy weapon assault.”

Michael Clark, a wildland firefighter in Oahu, was frustrated by the conspiracy theories and started posting videos of his own debunking those claims and calling out those spreading the theories for “trying to get views and clicks off a horrific event.”

“It’s kind of concerning to see how many people think that there’s this giant laser beam coming down from the sky, and they’re not going to try to own up to climate change or anything like that,” Clark told Fu. “So I just thought I’d take it upon myself as a professional in the wildland firefighting career to try and speak up.”

5. Amid images and news of actual war, false and misleading claims about Israel-Hamas thrive

“Decimated communities. Burned-out buildings. Survivors mourning loved ones killed amid smoke and debris. These are the all-too-real scenes of Israel and Gaza,” PolitiFact reporter Sara Swann wrote in this Oct. 13 article. “But in the days since Hamas militants launched an Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the deadliest in years, online misinformation has distorted the facts around the conflict.”

Poynter republished this PolitiFact roundup of its fact-checks of viral misleading claims about the Israel-Hamas war, debunking:

• Out-of-context images from past events being characterized as if they were from Israel and Gaza
• Video game combat shared as real footage
• Misleading claims about U.S. aid to Israel
• Republican politicians falsely putting blame on President Joe Biden for the attack by tying it to funding from a controversial hostage-release agreement with Hamas-supporting Iran.

6. We’ve seen reports of three train derailments this month. Is this normal? 

Poynter occasionally reposts articles from our in-house fact-checking enterprise, PolitiFact, that we think make Poynter readers better informed about the world. After the calamitous derailment of a freight train in East Palestine, Ohio, was followed by two other train derailments in the weeks afterward, social media users started raising questions about what exactly was going on, if anything.

“I know NOTHING about trains — is this a normal occurrence?” one Twitter user asked. “Any experts want to weigh in?”

PolitiFact reporter Madison Czopek looked into it, and found that yes, train derailments happen fairly often. More than 1,000 train accidents happen every year, according to federal data, but most don’t become national news because they don’t involve death, injury or hazardous substances.

7. What are the chances Fox News loses the lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems?

Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News, filed over the network’s reporting on the 2020 presidential election that targeted the company for “rigging” the vote, narrowly avoided going to trial this April thanks to a last-minute $787.5 million settlement from Fox.

Anticipation ramped up in the month before the trial was set to start, as details from depositions in the case became public. Messages, texts and testimony from Fox News executives and on-air personalities appeared to show they knew claims of a rigged 2020 presidential election were not true, but kept promoting the message on Fox News’ airways anyway.

In this installment of the Poynter Report after those details became public, senior media writer Tom Jones sized up Dominion’s chances at winning the lawsuit. Attorney Lee Levine told The Los Angeles Times’ Stephen Battaglio that Dominion has “one of the strongest plaintiff’s cases that I’ve ever seen.” He said, “I have a hard time envisioning a scenario in which Fox wins before a jury.”

As we found out shortly afterward, so did Fox News.

8. Fox News’ Sean Hannity gets involved in the House speaker vote

In the kerfuffle around the House speaker vote — well, the second kerfuffle this year, after an earlier painstaking process elected Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in the 15th round of voting — Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) vied to replace the ousted McCarthy. He had the backing of a hugely influential part of the Republican Party: Fox News prime-time host Sean Hannity.

In a popular issue of his newsletter, the Poynter Report, Jones wrote about Hannity’s involvement in the House speaker race. Hannity’s show emailed some GOP lawmakers for confirmation of them not supporting Jordan for speaker, which read, in part: “… if true, Hannity would like to know why during a war breaking out between Israel and Hamas, with the war in Ukraine, with the wide open borders, with a budget that’s unfinished why would Rep xxxx be against Rep Jim Jordan for speaker? Please let us know when Rep xxxx plans on opening The People’s House so work can be done.”

“Any legitimate news outlet would (or should) have a problem with its biggest star getting personally involved in something as politically big as this,” Jones wrote.

9. How The Daily Tar Heel designed the front page everyone is talking about 

After the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill went into an hourslong lockdown when an armed person fatally shot a faculty member, UNC student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel scrapped its original front page and started thinking. Emmy Martin, the 2023-24 editor-in-chief of The Daily Tar Heel, was in bed and looking through all the text messages she’d received during the lockdown. She hadn’t had a chance to respond to them. She also saw social media posts from some of her UNC peers who posted the text messages they’d received.

“And that’s kind of when it hit me. Everyone was getting these texts, and we were all kind of not having the same experience, but having an experience we all shared together,” Martin said. “That’s when I kind of knew that that is our front page.”

Amaris Castillo, a contributor to Poynter.org and writing/research assistant for the NPR Public Editor, spoke to Martin, print managing editor Caitlyn Yaede and general manager and news adviser Courtney Mitchell about putting together the new front page, which drew nationwide attention and was later shared by President Biden.

10. The basics on Israel, Gaza, Palestine and Hamas for local journalists

“The war between Israel and Hamas is rooted in the complex politics, military control and religions of the region. In every newsroom across the United States, a host of journalists find themselves scrambling to get up to speed on what is arguably the world’s most complex conflict,” Poynter senior vice president Kelly McBride and former faculty Al Tompkins wrote in the opening of this guide, published a week after Oct. 7.

McBride and Tompkins go on to provide a guide to the basics of Israeli and Palestinian history, longrunning human rights concerns about conditions imposed in Gaza by Israel, the emergence of Hamas as both a political moment and Islamist militant movement, careful word choice in covering the conflict, covering protests, and when and how to use graphic imagery.

“While there are many sources of information, it’s important to recognize that both Hamas and the Israeli government have an interest in presenting their side of warfare,” McBride and Tompkins write. “For journalists, the ethical principle of independence requires news organizations to be open to completeness and accuracy.”

Honorable mention: the archival piece people literally never stop finding via Google

One article racked up more reading time than anything else on this list. I knew what it was going to be before I ever sat down to write this article: “Should you trust media bias charts?”

Written by former MediaWise intern Jake Sheridan, this story interviews the people behind two popular media bias charts and digs into their methodology for rating news outlets for partisan bias.

As the person who compiles the analytics reports for Poynter.org, I have seen this story in our top 10, if not the top five … maybe every single week in the year and a half I’ve worked here? It’s always driven by search results and we never repost it, but nevertheless, “Should you trust media bias charts?” persisted.

But frankly, I’m tired of seeing it in our weekly results (sorry, Jake). As we head into 2024, I carry hope it will fade into oblivion, clicked on here and there but never again dominating our analytics, finally laid to rest.