It’s long been a news business cliché that if it bleeds, it leads.
A cursory look at most newscasts will confirm this suspicion. Taking a glance at the metro page of most daily papers will give you a similar perspective.
Reporting on crime is an important part of any newsgathering organization. And we can say both anecdotally and with hard evidence that such stories rightfully garner a lot of public attention. But in the changing world of the newspaper industry, the art of drumming up attention is receiving more attention than the news itself.
There is a lot of talk in the news business about search engine optimization, writing for the attention span of today’s Internet user and studying things like “click throughs,” “bounce rates” and “engagement.”
That’s all quite well and good, but we’ve never been a publication that’s bent our coverage to fit into trends or chased a story in the name of pageviews. And we find our readers like that.
That can’t be said for everyone. In the past few years, it’s become customary for top 10 roundups of year’s top stories to be accompanied by a list of the top most-read (or most popular) stories. Those results speak volumes about human nature.
In general, big impact stories like the death of Osama bin Laden and the earthquake in Japan dominated the news for most major outlets last year. But once you get past those, you’d be surprised (or maybe not) at what passes for public interest.
In 2011, abcnews.com’s most popular story of the year was a list of the top 50 most Googled female celebrities (we’ll note there’s a handy link to a gallery of “Celebrity Beach Bods” right after the lede).
The story that was shared on Facebook the third most often last year (after the Japan disaster and an op-ed on teachers) was the earth-shattering exposé on how zodiac signs aren’t shifting. That’s followed by another op-ed entitled “Parents, don’t dress your girls like tramps.”
Even politics is not safe. On Slate, which is considered a fairly hip magazine that does a lot of political coverage and commentary, the most popular political story in 2011 was not on geopolitical issues, the Occupy movement or the debt crisis, but was an article examining whether another publication’s cover art of Michele Bachmann was sexist.
And as usual, when it comes to what people are looking for on the web, Japan and Osama were both beaten out in overall searches by “American Idol,” “Kim Kardashian” and “Lindsay Lohan,” among other famous faces.
All of this is not intended to be simply a treatise on the state of the public conversation in this country. What’s interesting is that when we sat down and put together data from the past 12 months, we found our readers buck the trend. Along with our crime coverage and breaking news items were stories about local politics, sports and human interest.
While we’re putting a lot of effort into our online presence and making sure spotlightnews.com is with the times, what we’re finding is when it comes to local news and our readers there’s no need to play to the lowest common denominator. And we think that’s swell.
So as our staff members congratulate one another on a great showing at the annual New York Press Association awards, we’d like to extend our thanks to you, the reader. Thank you for reading, and moreover thank you for taking an interest in your community.
