Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Numbers don't lie, readers read bad news

Heroin is the talk of the town. We can tell because we've got the web traffic data to prove it. Crime has always accounted for the most-read articles on our website. Our page used to have a “most viewed” tab showing the top five articles readers were clicking on. Relatively minor crime items routinely outranked important local issues. We don't have the tab anymore, but from time to time we get these traffic reports which show the same thing.

Even on Facebook, stories on crime get massive amounts of attention in the form of comments.

This looks at the most-viewed articles published to the website between Feb. 23 and March 8. The percentages to the far right are out of the entire New England News Group.




Bennington Banner


Headline Views As % of all site views
Local woman charged with reckless endangerment


This was article about a woman who allegedly overdosed on heroin while here two young children were in the house alone with her. They called their father, who then called police.
4,196 1.1%

Friday traffic stop leads to arrest of major area heroin supplier


The headline sums it up nicely. Police notified us through a press release and we learned more in court a few days later.
3,288 0.9%

Readers react to story about Bennington's heroin problem in the New York Times


The New York Times (Kind of a big deal in the news world) wrote an article about Bennington and we wrote an article about local people's reaction.


2,548 0.7%
Police: Recent arrests are a step up, targeting major drug dealers


Heroin again!
2,450 0.7%

Coalition reveals extent of debt; officers say they're on track


This article was written in April of last year and was popping up on the “most viewed” list for months, even after the tab was removed from our main page and lived as a ghost on our archives page.


1,609 0.4%





UPDATE: Missing teens found


Two young women ran away from Bennington School and were later found safe.
1,162 0.3%

Man pleads not guilty to third DUI, charges related to car chase

People love car chases.
1,144 0.3%

Police search for missing teens


This was about those teens that were later found.
1,101 0.3%






Shaftsbury man accused of spanking children


With a belt, and possibly a spatula.
914 0.2%

Crash in Hoosick Falls injures three


Car crashes seem to come in clusters. Hopefully there won't be more anytime soon.
870 0.2%


Fun facts:
-My paycheck remains the same whether the news is bad or good, regardless of how many people read it.
-Many of the articles I would use in my portfolio are the ones few people read.
-Writing good news is often just as easy/hard as writing bad news.

Bad news tends to be what people talk about and so we hear about it more. Good news has a bad habit of reaching our ears half an hour before the good-news event is set to take place. The human mind also tends to view the world with a, “Don't fix what ain't broke,” mentality, so when everything is fine and dandy people are quiet but when it hits the fan, that's when people start to chatter.

Readers would look with utter befuddlement at the headline, “Nothing bad happened today. Everything is fine,” if they noticed it at all. A few would quip, “Sounds like an Onion article,” a joke that never gets old and is always funny.

I'm reminded of the audit reports in Pownal before the recent accounting strife there. The auditing firm would take up the better part of a Select Board meeting telling the board the town's books are largely in order with a few things that could be done a little better. “Stop the presses!” I never said to my editor, ever.