đ Press-Citizen's most viewed post of 2020 (pt. 1)
A look at the articles that drove traffic last year.
January 3, 2021 | Letter No. 18
It shouldnât be a surprise that the articles that perform best online are rarely the articles that reporters are the proudest of. There are exceptions, but as a rule, when People.com picks up your article, itâs the one about Frankie the therapy pig, not the investigation into how a city is using automatic speeding cameras to fund its police department. Iâm not bitter about this.
Itâs hard to pin down any one reason for a story performing as well as some of these did. Maybe it probed at a curiosity that was front of mind. Maybe it told a story people wanted to read. Maybe the shifting sands of content serving platforms gave it the play it needed to succeed. Sometimes glib, surface-level stories do well. Sometimes an important story well told doesnât. Everything from SEO language in titles to whether Chad Leistikow wrote it can be the difference between a chart-topper and something no one will read.
For the next two Sundays, I wanted to walk through the 10 articles that did the best on press-citizen.com. Iâll be keeping some proprietary info about visitors and engagement time to myself, but I think this is a fun way to think through this year, not as a reporter, but as a fellow reader.
10. Some dude tested positive for COVID-19 at the grocery (Isaac Hamlet)
There was a time when an employee testing positive for COVID-19 was news. March 23, 2020 was that time. We reported an employee tested positive for COVID-19 at the local Hy-Vee.
Early in the pandemic, people would call in to drop the dime on their girlfriendâs employer or sonâs church group having someone test positive for COVID-19. There was a time when it was a genuine question whether that was newsworthy.
Iowaâs non-handle on the pandemic eventually made reporting these individual instances impossible. But there was a way for local pandemic reporting to go tabloid and report out these instances.
Even with vaccines on the way, the pandemic remains a dangerous business. And back in March, we just didnât know a lot about what was going on. We had some good information. The governor had shut down restaurants and bars. We knew not to gather in spaces, but many people were having us back to normal by the end of the summer, a laughably hopeful thought on this side of 2020.
The first COVID-19 positive cases in Iowa appeared in early March. In the weeks and months that followed, we saw it surge in communities like our own.
For me, this story brings me back to that time.
9. IA-02 recount decided by just 6 votes (yours truly)
At the end of November, Iowaâs 2nd Congressional District had the result of its recount: Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeksâwho was ahead by 282 votesâwas now ahead by just six votes.
Democrat Rita Hart is petitioning Congress to do a full recount of the district. But Miller-Meeks will likely be seated in the chamber this week.
Going into this election, I think many thought Democrats had this seat in the bag. U.S. Rep. Dave Loebsack had been a non-controversial Democrat, handily beating back Republican challengers. In Miller-Meeksâ case, Loebsack beat her in three elections: 2008, 2010 and 2014.
I donât think itâs a surprise that this was well-read given that a federal election came down to just six votes. But some part of its performance feels like it was tied to the surprise over this outcome.
8. (The now dead) Johnson County Mug Shots article
Due to the hard work and advocacy of several members of our staff, but particularly public safety reporter Hillary Ojeda, the Press-Citizen ended the unethical practice of reflexively publishing daily mugshots at the end of June.
For those who donât know, a âmugshotâ is a picture taken of a person being processed by law enforcement following their arrest. They are not voluntary and along with the immediate facts and circumstances, are among the few public details available for an incident under investigation.
Newspapers commonly took these images of peopleâwho arenât convicted of a crimeâand published image, name, and alleged crime. As newsrooms moved online, these galleries have remained popular among readers. Meanwhile, the move online meant these galleries lasted longer. When charges were dropped, when records were expunged, it was the newspaper that continued to host these galleries.
the mugshot gallery would easily be at the top of this list. And aside from being popular, Iâve worked for editors who endorsed the practice, saying it was a source of public shaming that was important to maintain. But given the history of disproportionate policing of poor and nonwhite communities in our country, that shame was never meted equitably.
The Press-Citizen has harmed our city through this practice. Iâm glad weâve ended it, but I think it points to the need to reconsider what are our common practices and whether we should or shouldnât be involved in them.
7. âThe Miracle Seasonâ: Meet the real people who inspired the movie (Dargan Southard)
Sometimes a âNames and Facesâ story is big news.
There are some things that go into your local newspaper because itâs local people doing local things. A photographer I used to work with called these stories âNames and Facesâ stories. Theyâre feature-y with big photos of a middle schooler winning the science fair or a local restaurant passing the reigns to the next generation. On their surface, theyâre plenty interesting, but they work because thatâs the middle school your kids went to, the place you grab lunch from on Tuesdays.
âNames and Facesâ is an offering national outlets and their statewide counterparts donât have to think about (the only equivalent I can imagine is tabloid celebrity news). They donât think about it, and they also canât benefit from it.
I think these stories, the particular work that they do, often get undersold by newspapers to their detriment. Itâs the kind of thing that just doesnât get put together otherwise. The kind of food group that makes the budget story and school board brief go down more smoothly.
Something truly unique of a town, for a town.
And sometimesâas is the case with this storyâa Names article has a big frame. Local characters in a nationwide movie. Itâs pretty cool to see how the movie machine translated a story from this town into celluloid.
6. Derecho: More than 75,000 still without power in Johnson County (Hillary Ojeda)
There is nothing that shakes me more than stumbling across pictures of the 15-foot piles of tree debris left after an inland, hurricane-force storm blew through Iowa. In the ensuing days, those lucky enough to still have a roof over their head took days to get power back. It hit on a Monday and that Saturday, 1,600 in the Iowa City area were still without power.
Through updates on this article, Ojeda kept us in the loop, giving a play-by-play into what services were lost, where and when we could expect to get them back. It was a huge service. It was the kind of synthesis of information that she was uniquely providing.
You hope your town is never hit by a disaster like that (and IC had it better than most). But when the next derecho comes, Iâm glad the paper can again be there for readers as they come through in search of information.
Next Sunday, Iâll break down the final five best-performing articles from 2020 and see what more we can learn from them. Until then.
Your friendly neighborhood reporter,
Zachary Oren Smith
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Zachary Oren Smith writes about government, growth and development for the Iowa City Press-Citizen. Reach him at zsmith@press-citizen.com, at 319 -339-7354 or on Twitter via @Zacharyos.