Sometimes our readers don’t always agree with our picks for the biggest stories of the year.
We based our choices on the impact on the community and the lasting influence that an event or issue continues to have. Our choices this year – the municipal election, teachers’ strike, hotel construction (or lack thereof), school closures and the shooting at Western Forest Products – were based on this criteria.
It’s not until we search through the statistics on our website that we start to doubt whether we’re on the same page as our readers.
The most read story in 2014 at www.nanaimobulletin.com was about a 16-year-old girl who was stabbed multiple times behind Country Club Centre. The follow-up story about Nanaimo RCMP arresting a suspect landed at No. 10.
All we see are statistics: number of clicks, duration on the page, entry and exit pages, among others. We don’t have the opportunity to ask why this particular story garnered the most interest, but we have noticed that when we write a story about anyone under the age of 25 their social networks kick into overdrive and the clicks skyrocket. The victim’s age – as well as that of the stabbing suspect, who was 19 at the time – probably played into the interest in the story.
The second most popular story online was about the pod of orcas that hunted a school of dolphins into Departure Bay.
The municipal election was of big interest for readers, which was why we created a microsite across Black Press newspapers to organize candidates and issues by community. The News Bulletin’s municipal election section slotted in at fourth spot, edged out by the candidate’s question-and-answer section in third spot.
I took out our other landing pages – news, sports, obituaries – when compiling my data.
Online readers were safety conscious, too. At fifth spot was the boil water advisory from the City of Nanaimo, followed by a story about a high-risk offender arrested.
Municipal election landed on the list again in seventh place with the story of Bill McKay’s win for Nanaimo mayor.
In eighth place was our story on the cancellation of Leadercast event. Many of the hits came from outside Nanaimo, suggesting that other social networks were driving traffic to our site.
A lot of people want to work at Tilray, the company mass producing medical marijuana out at Duke Point, as the story about a hiring fair ended up in the ninth spot for most-read stories for the entire year.
Failing to crack the top 10: a missing teen (11); restaurant fire in Cassidy (12); bomb threat at Costco (13); and the shooting at Western Forest Products (14).
I often hear from readers that we never print any “good news.” We do, and quite a bit, I might add – our pages are filled with features on people doing good things, winning awards and donating money.
Yet none of those stories made the top 10.
editor@nanaimobulletin.com