Columns that few will read — and why they matter

We columnists imagine our articles going viral, sweeping the world, carried into Cabinet rooms, changing history.

And then I wake up. Today I’m sharing with you my clunkers, columns that were read by ... well, perhaps by my wife.

I’d say that they bombed, except that would connote impact.

My No. 1 Worst-Read Column in 2019 was from Hong Kong, one of the great cities of the world. But it’s now a battleground in the fight for global freedom — and I fear where it’s headed.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, sees any compromise as a sign of weakness, and protesters have been radicalized by police violence, so it’s hard to see any exit ramp. I worry that Beijing may eventually send in the People’s Armed Police for a violent crackdown.

“China’s Orwellian War on Religion” was another column that no one read. It focused on the roughly 1 million Muslims in the Xinjiang region in western China who have been confined to modern concentration camps.

China reportedly is forcing Muslims to violate their religious principles by eating pork or drinking alcohol. It is even dispatching men to move into the homes of families from Muslim minority groups, where they sometimes share the beds of women whose husbands are locked up.

The assault on Islam in Xinjiang is sometimes called a cultural genocide, and it’s accompanied by heightened repression of Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism. China is complicated, and the paradox is that religious people in China are more likely to see their children survive and go to a university than a generation ago — but also more likely to see them arrested for their faith.

Columns about the humanitarian catastrophe in Venezuela were also high on the list of those that were ignored. I made two trips to the region in 2019, meeting children who were starving, including a year-old child who weighed just 11 pounds. Some Venezuelan children already are dying, and it could get much worse.

Then there was an unread column from Paraguay about growing evidence that hope is a critical factor in overcoming poverty. Another dud noted that global health efforts are succeeding.

Knowing that policy stories aren’t sexy, I’ve tried to be creative. A colleague, Stuart A. Thompson, and I painstakingly created an online tool that let readers take the money that President Donald Trump wanted for the border wall and reallocate it for programs that would do more for the security and well-being of Americans and foreigners alike.

Readers stayed away.

As I look through my list of clunkers, one lesson is clear: Trump sells, and international stories don’t, especially when they are about humanitarian issues and aren’t embarrassing to Trump.

Then again, while I periodically write lousy columns, and I also regularly write columns that no one reads, these aren’t necessarily the same ones. What The Times and I both care about is quality journalism, not page views.

Invariably when I give a talk at a university, someone will lament that more journalists don’t cover humanitarian stories. The challenge is this: If more journalists covered these issues, more news organizations would go broke. We in journalism are still working out the business model for such stories, and philanthropic nonprofits may be part of the answer.

In the meantime, I’m deeply grateful this holiday season to a newspaper that gives me free rein to cover these stories and to all of you readers.