Readers’ choice: Your favourite stories
On most days, popular items on our website are invariably stories about crime or the weather, photos of cute animals or home renovations, and anything about the Oilers.
In general, local stories trump national or international ones.
So this year, when it came time to crunch the numbers to determine what items were clicked on the most on our website in 2012, we were met with a bit of a surprise.
The No. 1 story at edmontonjournal.com was one we posted on March 21 from wire service Agence France-Presse about U.S. President Barack Obama’s teenage daughter, Malia, visiting Mexico over spring break. With 986,188 page views, the story was far and away our top clicker. (Indeed, the No. 2 story has less than half that many page views.)
It’s not local, it’s not about crime, animals or weather. What happened?
International articles tend not to do very well on edmontonjournal.com since they are usually available from countless stories across the Internet. In this case, the story did well on our site precisely because it was not available elsewhere.
Written by a correspondent in Mexico, the story wasn’t posted on news websites in the U.S. due to a long-standing convention among the American media of not reporting about the activities of children in the White House. International news organizations do not have the same policy, so the story was posted on a handful of non-U.S. sites, including the Edmonton Journal. The interest was so great and the story was linked to from so many social media sites that— despite it being published in March — it was still getting thousands of page views on edmontonjournal.com through the summer.
The next most popular stories
of 2012 were a bit more in keeping with tradition:
1. University of Alberta shooting: Mother begs accused to turn self in (405,916 page views)
This article stands out because it garnered an incredible number of page views in a very short period of time. Shortly after midnight on June 15, four armed security guards were shot at HUB Mall on the University of Alberta campus while delivering money to cash machines. Three died, and a fourth was critically injured. A fifth guard would be arrested at the U.S. border in B.C. the next day with more than $300,000 in his truck. He was later charged with murder, attempted murder and armed robbery. When the shooting first happened, the Journal
reported on the story through the night, and by the time the final update to the story was made late that evening — about 22 hours later — hundreds of thousands of people had clicked on the story.
2. “Goosecam” goslings leave the nest (155,629 page views)
The Journal’s livestream video of a goose sitting on her nest is always one of the most popular things online in the spring; photographer Bruce Edwards has been coordinating the Goosecam for five years now. Every day, hundreds of people watch to see when the eggs will hatch. When they did on May 14, thousands of people watched.
3. Hail pounds Calgary like ‘gunfire’ (84,398 page views)
Everyone loves to talk about the weather so it’s no surprise to see a major hailstorm near the top of the list. Why did this one do better than a local story? Well, who in Edmonton wouldn’t prefer the bad weather to hit our neighbours to the south instead of us?
The stories our readers click on when they come to edmontonjournal.com via their home or work computer are often different than the ones they read on their mobile devices. Here are the top stories of 2012 as read by readers on their phones:
1. Staples: Leaked arena images reveal a welcoming downtown beacon (150,460 page views)
The ongoing saga of the downtown arena has consistently been one of the most popular stories during the year. This column by David Staples gave readers something a little bit new — images of the proposed design — which was a welcome change from the brinkmanship between city council and Oilers owner Daryl Katz.
2. Father and son were best friends who died together (132,759 page views)
This was the tragic story of Chad Janke and his father Tim who went quadding and fishing at their remote northern Alberta cabin in early February, but never came back. A fire destroyed the cabin, and killed them both.
3. Witness pulled child from Highway 63 wreck (117,896 page views)
Published a few days after a horrifying crash on Highway 63 left seven people dead, this story recounted how a passerby pulled three-year-old Timothy Wheaton from the wreckage. The crash had killed his mother, father, and two-year-old brother, as well as a pregnant woman, two more adults and an 11-year-old girl. The crash renewed calls for the province to speed the twinning of Highway 63, which serves as the main gateway from Edmonton to Fort McMurray and north to the oilsands. Later in the year, the provincial government agreed to fast-track the construction.
Photo galleries are one of the most popular features on the Journal website. Here are the top three galleries in 2012:
1. Malcolm Mayes’ cartoons (1,650,373 page views)
As they were in 2011, awardwinning Journal cartoonist Malcolm Mayes’ editorial cartoons were the most clickedon images on our website in 2012.
2. University of Alberta shooting in Edmonton (319,027 page views)
Once again, the interest in the shooting at HUB Mall at the university was high, as readers sought to find out the latest news.
3. Heavy snowfall hits Edmonton (221,452 page views)
Snowstorms create amazing photos — some of beautiful wintry scenes, others of chaos on the roads — but they always are top clickers on the website. This gallery was created on Nov. 7, when up to 35 centimetres of snow fell in the city.