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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.
