Vancouver Sun:
For Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2007, the most e-mailed story from the New York Times website was entitled Appreciations: Mr. Noodle.
It was a sentimental eulogy of the recently deceased Momofuku Ando, inventor of instant ramen noodles.
The second most e-mailed story in the Times website was Happiness 101, about a class at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., on how to make yourself happier.
The third was Hot Stuff, about the gaudy new range of silicon kitchen utensils.
This ranking was offered, as it always is now by the Times, in the bottom right-hand corner of its Web page, in the section called Most Popular. It ranks the top 10 most e-mailed stories, the top 10 most blogged stories and the top 10 most researched stories.
As such, it’s a kind of barometer, though of what exactly is not clear.
That a story is the most e-mailed does not make it the most important, or that with the most impact. It does not even make it the most widely read, though it could be argued that the universality of the Web increases the odds that the most e-mailed story would have the best chance of reaching the greatest number of readers.
But what is clear about the Times list is the nature of the stories that dominate it.
The majority of them are almost all what a serious newspaper editor would call fluff, or even more tellingly, “human interest.”
They’re apolitical. They’re quirky, even screwball. They have what I call an “ah-h-h” factor — that sigh of relief a reader makes when he or she finds something in the paper to leaven the heavy, if necessary, fare of crime, war and policy issues.
Animals figure big in these stories, but so do stories on nature, cosmology, history, cuisine, art, culture and sometimes even the travails of real live human beings. (And so, too, do the stories of real dead human beings. On our Web page here at The Sun, said managing editor Kirk LaPointe, the obituaries are always among the most highly read parts of the website. That sensibility put reporter John Mackie’s terrific obit on Yvonne De Carlo on today’s front page.)
In the spirit of interactivity that the Web encourages, the habit of including most-read lists has spread among larger North American newspaper websites. (True to form, the Los Angeles Times most-read selections for Wednesday’s paper included a story about the increased use of Prozac to decrease anxiety in pets.) I’m not sure what this says about newspaper readers these days, or what it should tell newspaper editors about what people want to read. There is the danger that, in trying to stanch circulation losses, editors can read too much into it.
“You can’t design a newspaper on a feedback loop alone,” LaPointe said, arguing that while it is no surprise readers are drawn to quirky stories, newspapers have to strike a balance between entertainment and sobriety. A steady diet of cats on Prozac would leave a bad taste in the mouth, and ruin a paper’s reputation as a reliable news source. On the other hand, there is a case to be made that newspapers have become too sober.
In a 1997 study entitled American Journalism and the Decline in Event-Centered Reporting (and thanks to UBC assistant professor of journalism Mary-Lynn Young for bringing it to my attention), authors Kevin Barnhurst and Diana Mutz found that over the past century, news stories in American newspapers grew longer, more analytical and were less about individuals but more about groups and officials.
In other words, newspapers have become more abstract, better researched but less interested in the immediate human experience. Newspapers have gone wonk-ish.
“Instead of moulding and shaping stories,” Barnhurst and Metz concluded, “the new long journalism fabricates other things: abstract themes, expert analyses, and discouraging problems . . . Among the many consequences of the shift to interpretive and thematic news, one may be the most ironic of all: that the new long journalism makes news about ordinary people more appealing.”
Did you know Momofuku Ando invented instant ramen noodles in 1958 because he wanted cheap, nourishing food for the working class? Did you know he died at the age of 96? Did you know 100 million people a day dine on his invention, and that according to the New York Times, he has earned “an eternal place in the pantheon of human progress?”
What newspaper reader, starved for the human touch, wouldn’t devour a story like that?
