Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

How do you measure a year in news? 2016 brought political earthquakes in the U.S. and Britain. Police shootings and terror attacks were recorded on cell phones. In pop culture, we collectively mourned for Prince and Carrie Fisher, gaped in astonishment at Sean Penn’s gonzo interview of El Chapo, and celebrated human achievement at the Rio Olympics. Reporters turned these events into stories that drew the attention of millions of readers.

A new report out this week from web analytics firm Chartbeat reveals the best of the best — “the stories that defined the breadth, the depth, and the power of journalism in 2016” — drawing on data from more than 50,000 media sites around the world.

How does one story stand out in a sea of content? It has to be outstanding journalism.

The 102 stories on the list had the most total engaged time — how long online visitors spent actively reading — of all the stories that Chartbeat measured. In total, they commanded 2.5 billion engaged minutes, or almost five millennia of the world’s collective attention.

Not surprisingly, the list is dominated by politics, with Nate Silver’s Election Forecast at the top. The top breaking news story is CNN’s coverage of the Orlando nightclub shooting in June. Sports, opinion and entertainment make the list as well....

Back in June, I talked with Parse.ly data analyst Conrad Lee about why stories about Donald Trump weren’t attracting the same audience online as they were on television. At the time, based on data from more than 100,000 news articles from 300 newsrooms, it looked as if Trump stories were actually less popular than stories about other candidates, including Hillary Clinton. This was before the convention and the formal nomination of both candidates of course.

Lee took an another look at the data last week and found that things have shifted. Trump still receives the lion's share of articles, even from publishers that are left-leaning.

Today the data show that Trump stories get more page views than stories about Clinton do. Both the overall number of stories and page views per post peaked around the conventions in late July, before dipping again in August.

Lee makes no distinction between positive and negative stories. Both candidates have been the subject of intense reporting in recent weeks. But this is an interesting set of data nonetheless as we think about the proper role of journalists going into the first debate next week, when 75 percent of voters plan to tune in....