The Public's Eyes: Big In '05
Not enough, as far as I'm concerned.
Westneat got to write that line because a story about a man who died while having sex with a horse "was by far the year's most read article." But when I looked into CBSNews.com's statistics for '05, I found that I couldn't come up with anything quite so precise. The problem -- and you'll have to bear with me here for a second – is that some big stories get edited and updated without their "slug" being changed, while others get assigned different slugs as time passes. (A story's slug is what is used to count page views and visits.) So it's more or less impossible to pull together an accurate list of the top stories.
That doesn't mean we can't scour the list for some interesting tidbits, however. The story with the most hits was "Caught On Tape," which is a continually updated, year-round story featuring stuff that was, um, caught on tape. A few slots down comes a story from January 10th that generated a ton of traffic but is one that most of the people in this building would like to forget: "CBS Ousts 4 For Bush Guard Story." (Hey, all that traffic is not much of a silver lining, but it's something.) Another huge traffic generator was a "60 Minutes" story on Indian actress Aishwarya Rai, who is considered by some to be the world's most beautiful woman. I have no idea why that one was so popular, but one theory in the newsroom is that the story was linked to from one or more popular Indian Web sites. A link from a high traffic site like Drudge or Huffington Post (or their Indian equivalents, God forbid) means a significant spike in traffic.
Also finishing strong in '05 is another "60 Minutes" story, this one on George Lucas and the final installment of "Star Wars." The force of geeks was strong in that one, I imagine. The pope did well; so, lamentably, did Natalee Holloway. Folks were also interested in the CIA leak case. They spent an awful lot of time playing Sudoku. And when "Big Brother" winner Maggie Ausburn told all, well, a rather obscene number of people listened.
Other strong finishers: A plant that may fight fat, Andy Rooney's take on Iraq, a pregnant skydiver who survived a chute malfunction, and, of course, the passing of our old friend Sam The Hairless Dog, better known, perhaps, as the world's ugliest canine.
I've written about Sam before – twice, in fact. Some might say that The Public's Eyes is slightly obsessed with him. I have, it seems, developed something of a soft spot for the little guy. Maybe, just maybe, he's become a metaphor of some kind for me: A shriveled, ugly, but still loveable creature that has endured in a world that doesn't have much sympathy for him. I do, after all, spend an awful lot of time thinking about the news business.