Chartbeat’s list of the best-read digital stories of the year (as measured by engaged minutes among its clients) was released Tuesday. The winner: a Politico survey of 34 experts on how the coronavirus will change the world permanently.
Politics and the pandemic, the two biggest stories of 2020, were paired in the Politico piece and common themes both on Chartbeat’s list and separate compilations by The New Yorker’s website and the sites of New York Magazine.
Those topics were, however, not the only draws for readers. Second on the Chartbeat list was a Los Angeles Times story on the investigation of the causes of the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant. New York’s most-read story was model Emily Ratajkowski’s first-person account of a photographer expropriating pictures from a photoshoot and publishing several books without her consent.
Straight political stories did well. The top two for The New Yorker were both Jane Mayer investigations — one on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as the president’s “enabler-in-chief,” the other on legal difficulties that await President Donald Trump when he leaves office.
No. 3 on Chartbeat’s list was a New York Times investigation of Trump’s tax avoidance and No. 5 was a Politico piece by a body language expert on the conventions.
Stories related to police shootings and Black Lives Matter did not command the same level of attention overall but a New York Times reconstruction of Breonna Taylor’s shooting was among Chartbeat’s top 10.
Chartbeat configured its list differently this year, labeling it “most engaging” and with separate top 10 categories for infographics (the BBC’s map of coronavirus cases in the United Kingdom was first) and live blogs (Denmark’s n-tv’s “Coronavirus Live Ticker”).
The Politico piece, published March 19, was digestible in small segments and organized by subcategories like “community” and “government.” It seemed to tap early into a hunger for a broad perspective on the pandemic beyond the running case and death tolls and day-to-day federal response bungling.
Matt Kaminski, editor-in-chief of Politico, commented in an email: “POLITICO’s secret sauce has always been to tell readers something they didn’t previously know. Being the ‘first’ to do that can mean beating the competition by minutes in an email alert on the latest cabinet piece. Or it can mean, as with this piece, a big-think package in our Magazine that lets our audience peer around the corner to see how the world could be remade by the coronavirus crisis.”
Steve Heuser, who edits Politico Magazine, added that the digital publication was looking for big insight fast. “We decided to scramble the jets on a multi-author piece on our Magazine platform — it’s a format we use for big events, letting us move very quickly but also deliver a wide range of people simultaneously. … Several dozen experts came through quickly. One thing we were struck by — and probably one of the reasons for the success of the package — was their optimism. The pandemic was going to be rough in a lot of ways, but they saw a chance for some long-overdue changes as well.”
The New Yorker’s digital editor, Michael Luo, publishes an annual commentary on the site’s most successful stories. He chooses to rate those that lead users to become subscribers the highest, rather than the metric of engaged minutes.
Luo opened his piece noting the difficulty of reporting during a shutdown:
“On the evening of Tuesday, March 10th, as the threat of the novel coronavirus became increasingly plain in New York City, the staff of The New Yorker went home and never returned to our offices in One World Trade Center. The final editing, fact-checking, and other work on the following week’s issue — the cover depicted domino pieces in a pattern resembling the novel coronavirus — took place remotely. Over the next nine months, an unrelenting onslaught of news consumed the country — and The New Yorker. As of this writing, the magazine’s editorial staff has put out thirty-five print issues and published an additional three and a half million words online, all while collaborating day after day through squares on our laptop screens.”
New York, now owned by Vox Media, has a family of sites including Vulture, and The Cut. It uses the engaged minutes measure as compiled by its vendor, Parse.ly.
I asked New York editor David Haskell for a comment and he emailed this response highlighting the variety of the best read group:
“When I looked at the results, I found it to be a gratifying, amusing, sometimes-predictable-and-sometimes-head-scratching list. It’s also a pretty accurate reflection of the magazine’s breadth, depth, ambition and perspective during this historic year.
“There was a ton of stuff I’m proud of that doesn’t surface from a ‘most popular’ algorithm, which of course privileges pieces that perfectly hit a news cycle. But even so, our readers demonstrated that they rely on us not only for our contributions to the world’s biggest stories but for our ability to take them elsewhere. We chronicled Donald Trump’s operatic campaign and often terrifying slow-motion electoral defeat. We explained and complicated and narrated the arrival of a world-changing pandemic. Through a landmark profile of Michaela Coel and frank conversation with Thandie Newton and an unforgettable essay by Emily Ratajkowski, we surfaced the power dynamics at work in the culture industry and society at large.”
For both New York and The New Yorker, a number of the top stories (both the ones by Mayer and Ratajkowski’s) also appeared in print editions. But not all — digital content at the magazines is a business of its own, a daily supplement to the content of the less frequent legacy print product.
Chartbeat’s list is limited to its own client list — a large one with international representation but by no means comprehensive of all digital sites. Also, as I noted last year, with more and tighter paywalls, sites like Politico’s that remain free have an advantage.
The Chartbeat most engaging article list favors long-form work. Atlantic cover stories have topped the list three of the six years the list has been offered. One of Chartbeat’s founding principles was that unique visitors and pageviews, still widely used for ad sales, give an incomplete picture of which stories are most important to readers. Engaged time reading provides a better environment for ads and promoting subscriptions.
Chartbeat offers a total of engaged minutes for the year with its clients’ work — in 2020, that was 419,773,301,159. It does not prove anything but suggests journalism still holds its own in mindshare, as it competes with alternatives like streaming entertainment, Facebook and TikTok.
