
The New York Times' Most Popular Story of 2013 Was Not an Article - r0h1n
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2014/01/-em-the-new-york-times-em-most-popular-story-of-2013-was-not-an-article/283167/
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moskie
Yes, it's jarring to see the juxtaposition between the the first (Dialect Map)
and second (Boston Marathon bombings) pieces of content. But it should also be
remembered that articles about the Boston Marathon bombings could be found
anywhere from a variety of sources, while the Dialect Map tool was exclusive
to the New York Times.

I think that goes a long way to explain why, in the context of solely the NYT,
the Dialect Map was more popular. But let's not take that to mean that,
overall, people were more interested in the Dialect Map than the bombings.
They weren't.... they just got their information about the bombings somewhere
besides the NYT.

~~~
resu_nimda
I think that's missing the point, you kinda cherry-picked one piece to compare
to (albeit the next-most-popular one). As the article mentions, only four of
the top ten were breaking news stories. And yeah those are the least
interesting because that is the most basic and straightforward function of a
news organization and, as you noted, rather interchangeable with competitors'
offerings. And I don't think the article was attempting to say that "people
were more interested in the Dialect Map than the bombings."

But, the point is, when stacked up against the rest of the Times'
original/exclusive/investigative pieces - their differentiating content - an
interactive "app" was more popular than traditional journalistic prose (even
from noted celebrities!), and that they demonstrably missed opportunities by
not creating more apps.

As an aside, I agree with corresation's point that the "only 11 days" argument
is weak, in fact it probably got a massive viral boost by coming during the
holidays. Anecdotally I was with my family when we all did the quiz and talked
about it.

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wallflower
In a world where the attention span of adults and teenagers is trending
towards zero and where sites like [http://viralnova.com](http://viralnova.com)
and [http://upworthy.com](http://upworthy.com) do so well, links that go viral
have to do more than educate the reader - they have to briefly 'elevate' the
sharer in their loosely defined peer group with a momentary ego boost.

Reminds me of something that a legendary e-commerce marketer did once (before
FB probably banned the practice). He played to ego - the most important player
of all:

* Setup a Facebook app for fans of a certain college team (I believe it was the Cornhuskers)

* The Facebook app challenged the user with various and obscure trivia about the college team

* If you scored well enough, you were "rewarded" with a chance to share your score with your FB buddies and a "no-strings-attached" Netflix trial subscription

~~~
QuantumGood
"Better incentivize your industry's distributors, and the world will beat a
path to your door." ;-)

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jackmoore
I went through “How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk” when it came out, but I
probably wouldn't have taken the time if it had been with a less credible
site, like BuzzFeed. So maybe their success with this owes a lot to their
other journalism.

~~~
aliston
Great point -- in fact, I actually recall seeing a similar visualization on a
different site a couple weeks before the NYTs one came out. It was
interesting, but I dismissed it as less scientific because it wasn't on a
credible domain. No doubt, part of the success of this visualization was that
it was tied to the NYT.

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andr
The content-light format of "22 X that Y"[1][2][3], pioneered by Cracked and
perfected by BuzzFeed, is infecting other sites, including once-reputable ones
like Forbes[4], and indeed getting tons of eyeballs. I'm somewhat afraid next
year's top article won't be much more than funny pictures off Google with
witty captions.

[1] [http://www.buzzfeed.com/briangalindo/18-cartoons-from-
the-90...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/briangalindo/18-cartoons-from-the-90s-you-
probably-forgot-existed)

[2] [http://www.buzzfeed.com/tashweenali/gooey-
desserts](http://www.buzzfeed.com/tashweenali/gooey-desserts)

[3] [http://www.buzzfeed.com/hunterschwarz/23-oddly-specific-
netf...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/hunterschwarz/23-oddly-specific-netflix-
categories-that-only-have-one-show)

[4]
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2014/01/17/12-tip...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2014/01/17/12-tips-
for-overcoming-your-fear-of-change-at-work-2/)

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Cracked pioneered the listicle? Really? Source?

~~~
dictum
I can't confirm Cracked as the pioneers of the listicle, but ca. 2007 Digg was
the altar[1] of listicles and Cracked was the leading source for most of them.

[1] This has been beaten to death already, but the top subreddits definitely
have a 2007-2009 Digg vibe.

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ececconi
This makes sense because this 'story' was completely egocentric. When people
shared it, they did with the implication that devoting your time to this story
can tell you something about yourself.

People are most interested in themselves.

P.S. -- I think the quiz was very well done. I grew up near Miami and the
three cities it guessed were suburbs of Miami.

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moomin
Content created by a small team over the course of several weeks/months
outperforms content created in half an hour by two people.

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jonnathanson
As an occasional (and increasingly frequent) long-form journalist, I'm not the
least bit concerned here. Do we really expect that the most popular journalism
in the 21st century will follow a function derived from an outdated form?

The 'Regional Dialect Map' was a piece of interactive software. It was
interesting. It was engaging. It was sharable. It provided entertainment and,
I'd argue, legitimate utility to people who took the two to three minutes to
fill it out. It wasn't Pulitzer material, sure, but it was a far cry from one
of those "One Weird Trick to Lose Bellyfat" spamvertorials.

Traditional journalism has a place in the modern world, but its form is going
to evolve over time, and we shouldn't bemoan the inevitability. Everything is
not turning into a "Which Star Wars Character Are You?" poll. Everything is
not becoming a 132-character sound bite. Some things will. Maybe even most
things. And other, newer things will come along. Many of those things will be
useful, though they'll take forms that freak us out at first. That the _NYT_
's most popular piece of content was something untraditional is not
necessarily cause for alarm. If anything, this piece will be remembered, five
to ten years from now, as the primitive ancestor of the much cooler and more
engaging things that descended from it.

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aliston
I think that, for certain topics, these sorts of visualizations could be the
future of journalism. It allows one to take a complex subject, and illustrate
a portion of it much more lucidly than is possible in text.

That said, it also really interesting to note that the data for the "How
Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk" actually came from a Harvard study. The actual
"journalism" was really an exercise in UI for the NYT.

------
mbesto
I'm in the process of putting together a social experiment that draws some
similar conclusions to what people have addressed here. The idea is to create
365 link bait titles and then back fill them with content and publish one
article per day for one year. My hypothesis is that you could effectively
create a publishing company without great content, very well engineered
titles, and social media for the marketing. If anyone is interested in
helping, feel free to get in contact! I've already built some guidelines and
have a list of titles ready to go.

------
bthomas
Could it just be pagification? Each question in the quiz loads a new page

~~~
gruntmaster9000
Doubtful. The _Times_ has been moving away from pageviews as a metric (see
their recent redesign).

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corresation
And it probably pales in popularity compared to "Which Star Wars Character Are
You". It is surely eclipsed by "What is your Elf Name?"

What is the take away from this? What is the amazing discovery? What is the
reveal?

Some content is more accessible and shareable than others, often in a negative
correlation with value. In this case it's a linguistics/idioms test where you
can prove that you, indeed, live where you live.

It's also strange how much noise is being made about it doing it in "11
days!". Most content on news sites have an extremely steep popularity drop
off, and it isn't really the norm that people go back to revisit the news from
two weeks ago: A week after the fact, you aren't reading the original story
about the Boston Bomber, but instead are reading the newest one (of the
10,000+ that the NY Times published on the topic). There is nothing in that
particular observation.

~~~
kmfrk
A good example of this is how image-based submissions began dominating reddit
- especially after imgur - because, more than anything else, they can be
consumed in a second and voted on.

In my opinion, this development definitely did not change reddit for the
better.

~~~
vanderZwan
It's not that bad, because there are still subreddits with strict rules and
mods enforcing them. Compare /r/gaming to /r/games for example. And then
there's /r/AskHistorians of course, which is the standard by which all other
subreddits are judged.

EDIT: Having said that, I agree that the phenomenon you describe is very real.

