You would expect that in the feverish year now closing, politics would draw digital readers like no other topic. And you would be right. But audiences also spent a lot of time on engaging narratives, often about murders and violence, but not always.
That’s the pattern in the 10th edition of Chartbeat’s annual “most engaging stories” list — as measured in story-by-story minutes each is read on its 60,000 publisher client sites. Five of the top 10 stories were about the presidential race. But at the very top of the list was something else entirely: a CNN story on the arrest of the father of a school shooter near Atlanta who provided the gun.
The shooting was only miles from CNN’s headquarters. It led with the chilling detail that the father bought the AR-15-style rifle as a Christmas present for his 14-year-old son. The second half was an absorbing chronological reconstruction of what happened at the school.
Five of the top 10 stories were from CNN — an indicator of the fast response and craft of the network’s digital journalists, but also of the free site’s huge reach. Likewise, the BBC’s free sites had the second and third most popular, with stories on the would-be Donald Trump assassin and when and how Trump will take office.
I was also taken aback that two of CNN’s top five stories could be classified as true romance. The first (No. 5) was about an American woman who met a non-English-speaking Italian in a Rome bar. One thing led to another and they are now married and in an olive oil business together.
The second (No. 7) was about a couple who met in London’s Trafalgar Square 40 years ago after the woman had been stood up by another man. One thing led to another, you know how it goes. Both stories are by Francesca Street, a young travel writer who has made “chance encounters” a beat within her beat. Street had two other stories in the top 100 this year and five in 2023.
I write about these lists every December, in part because they illustrate the founding premise of Chartbeat: Its lead metric of minutes spent actively reading (versus leaving tabs open) is more meaningful than unique readers and pageviews, which may last only a few seconds.
Many advertisers still tilt toward the older metrics, but I would argue that registering high in time spent reading is a worthwhile audience measuring stick and target for reporters and editors to aim for. They succeed with strong content and storytelling — no clickbait.
Chartbeat is not alone in the best-read list game. The New Yorker has its own unique audience and its own annual list. This year’s most engaging story was a Patrick Radden Keefe narrative of a 19-year-old British man who got sucked in with Russian gangsters before mysteriously falling to his death.
Others in the same true crime vein were about a British nurse who killed seven babies (No. 3) and a man coming to terms with his wife murdering their children (No. 4).
In an accompanying essay, digital editor Michael Luo said this year’s list exemplifies what editor-in-chief David Remnick calls The New Yorker’s “weird” story mix — weird in the sense of unexpected and wildly varied. Politics were not entirely absent, though, led by a story on election results, a profile of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jane Mayer’s quick-turn expose of #MeToo accusations against Pete Hegsuth.
A couple more examples: At left-leaning Mother Jones, the top story was “The President is Now a King” on the Trump immunity ruling, with runners up a story on Kennedy and vaccines and one on a Black farmers’ group opposing J.D. Vance.
At New York magazine, the top two stories were a profile of pop scientist Andrew Huberman and a first-person piece by a business journalist, no less, who cleaned out her savings falling for a $50,000 scam.
We have our own top story list here at Poynter. Pieces from our PolitiFact affiliate and lead items from morning columnist Tom Jones nearly monopolized the list of 15. But the No. 1 story was something else altogether: my colleague Angela Fu’s story on a winner in the first Poynter Journalism Prizes competition about a Texas town of 250 that employed a 50-person police department. (I squeaked in near the end of the list with my story on a Gannett editor who was fired for talking to me).
The Chartbeat list carries two caveats. It includes only Chartbeat clients, numerous but not representing every well-known publication. Also, it tilts the table toward free sites, and the roster of paywall-protected sites continues to grow.
Not that paid sites can’t crack the list. The New York Times and The Washington Post each had stories in the top 10; last year’s most engaged piece was the Los Angeles Times obituary of “Friends” star Matthew Perry, who died young of an overdose.
My guess is that those stories generated a lot of traffic from Google search and social media recommendations and may have been offered free to infrequent visitors as a start on a strategy trying to convert them to pay.
One interesting variation, offered by The Washington Post to its digital subscribers, is a personalized “Newsprint” about what you read in the last year — number of stories, favorite topics, favorite author.
I’ll close as I did last year wondering why best-read lists remain infrequent, say, among regional newspapers, a main focus of my reporting. Talking with their communities and getting closer to their reading preferences, after all, has moved to the top of any list of strategic priorities.
Why not wrap up the year telling them what they read? That’s a nice reminder of news breaks and features they enjoyed, a chance to catch up with what they may have missed and documentation of paying attention to content preferences.
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