Typically, in a year in review summary, there’s a truck load of stories to underscore, some tragic, some inspirational, some historic and a few just simply out of the ordinary.
2016 was no exception except that Donald J. Trump and his unconventional thrust to the U.S. presidency seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the news cycle, eclipsing most other major stories while leaving others to sidebar status.
Yet, there were a few screaming headlines that not even the president-elect was able to outdo.
A horrific tragedy occurred in May when EgyptAir Flight 804, which was traveling from Paris to Cairo, crashed into the Mediterranean Sea with 66 people on board. No survivors were found.
Sadly, that wasn’t the only dreadful air crash.
At the end of November, a charter plane, carrying the Brazilian Chapecoense football squad, including 22 players, 23 coaches, 21 journalists and two guests, took off from Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, and slammed into a side of a mountain in Colombia, killing 71 of the 77 people on board.
In June, the anti-establishment mood took hold when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in a EU referendum (or Brexit) in which 51.9 percent of voters stunningly voted in favor of leaving the Union, resulting in a precipitous plunge in the global stock markets. The markets lost about $2 trillion in value the day after the historic vote. The Dow dropped 611 points, while Nasdaq had its worst day since 2011.
Not all was doom and gloom; there were some inspirational stories during the year.
Most notably, the 2016 Summer Olympics were held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where the United States won 46 gold, 37 silver and 38 bronze medals, for a total of 121, more than any other country.
And as the winter weather was setting in with cold blasts and gusty winds just around the corner, the Chicago Cubs of the “Windy City” ended their 108-year drought in November, beating the Cleveland Indians in seven games to claim their first world championship since 1908 in the 112th World Series.
In order to get a better sense of some of the online news stories that attracted the most attention, I checked in with some prominent news sites to see which stories drove the most traffic for 2016.
When Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old security guard, discharged a hail of bullets inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people and wounding 53 others, it was CNN.com's most trafficked story in 2016. There were 37 million page views, 81 percent of which were on mobile devices.
By far, however, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s bruising presidential campaign with guns and arrows in full swing — culminating in one of the most stunning election results in American history — was the story that kept on giving to a majority of online news sites.
It will come as little surprise that the most read stories of 2016 at The New York Times dealt with the presidential election. But for those tired of reading about the election, the Times has added a “No Politics” filter.
According to a company spokesperson, the most read non-political piece at NYTimes.com was “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person” by Alain de Botton, the author of the novel “The Course of Love.”
According to Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief of Guardian News & Media, the site’s U.S. election interactive was not only the item that drove the most amount of traffic “it was their biggest piece of Guardian journalism ever.”
Similarly, at Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, records were broken across all metrics during the last month of the U.S. Presidential Election race with its Election Forecast.
According to a company spokesperson, its election forecast was the most popular piece of individual content across all of ESPN’s web properties for the months of August and September as well as October. During the month, 4.9 million average weekly readers visited the forecast an average of 2.5 times and consumed 5.7 pages of content per visit.
In August, LATimes.com published its USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times “Daybreak” presidential poll that asked more than 400 people each day about their voting intentions. It was the Los Angeles Times’ highest trafficked item of the year.
The other major stories that drew record traffic at the Times’ site for the year was a Ku Klux Klan rally in Anaheim that erupted into violence as three people were stabbed and 13 others arrested, along with the story dealing with an Indiana man who was apprehended carrying a cache of weapons and explosive-making materials with the apparent intention of attending the L.A. Gay Pride Festival in West Hollywood.
At The Wall Street Journal, its online story centering on the internecine battle at the FBI over how best to proceed with its investigation of Hillary Clinton's email use and the 650,000 emails found on a laptop of former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner was the top story of the year at WSJ.com, according to a company spokesperson.
Another highly read story at WSJ.com dealt with the Obama administration’s airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran just as four Americans detainees in Tehran were released, raising sharp questions of whether it amounted to a quid pro quo or ransom.
The third biggest story of the year was when The Journal reported in November that the National Enquirer (a strong supporter of Donald Trump) declined to publish the story of a Playboy model's alleged affair with the Republican nominee.
At Politico, the story that drove the most traffic, according to editor-in-chief John Harris, was actually a post-election piece that broke down and scrutinized Donald Trump's unconventional and highly controversial Cabinet picks, comprised mostly of “industry titans and conservative activists.”
As the year kicked off, the Cook Political Report reported that despite calls for Hillary Clinton to push the panic button over the growing ascendency of populist candidate Bernie Sanders, the demographics (in which Sanders’ support is confined to white liberals), together with Clinton's lead with super delegates (elected officials, party activists and officials), made it more likely that the Vermont senator would get clobbered nationally. It was the Cook Political Report's most read story of the year.
The next top story at the Cook Political Report was its prediction that Donald Trump's historic unpopularity with a large body of the electorate (women, millennials, Latinos etc.) made the real estate mogul and reality television star the early underdog in November. As a result, the Cook Political Report was predicting seismic shifts in its 13-state scorecard, most of them favoring the Democrats.
The third biggest story at the Cook Political Report was Amy Walter's sharp deconstruction of the Iowa caucuses (in which Ted Cruz upset Donald Trump), as she reported how despite his narrow loss, Trump was attracting non-traditional voters to the polls; this along with 48 percent of Iowa voters in favor of a candidate who was outside the establishment compared with 46 percent who preferred candidates “who had experience in politics.”
At Time.com, the most read story of the year was its annual Person of the Year poll, ahead of the official Person of the Year announcement.
At The Marshall Project, a nonprofit nonpartisan online journalism organization that focuses on criminal justice in the United States, its top story included a gripping interview with Penny Beerntsen, who was brutally attacked and sexually assaulted while jogging on a Lake Michigan beach near her home in Wisconsin. Her chilling narrative became a chapter in Netflix's documentary, “Making a Murderer.”
Another widely read story was “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” a disturbing account of the hunt for a serial rapist, co-published by ProPublica and The Marshall Project, written by T. Christian Miller, a senior reporter for ProPublica, and Ken Armstrong, a writer for The Marshall Project. The piece was originally published in 2015, but earned a Pulitzer Prize this year. According to Bill Keller, editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape” became an episode of “This American Life,” a weekly one-hour radio program produced by WBEZ and hosted by Ira Glass with broadcasts on a number of public radio stations nationwide.
The third top story at The Marshall Project's website dealt was a piece written and produced in collaboration with National Public Radio about two inmates living together in a cell smaller than a parking space at the Menard Correctional Center in southern Illinois with one of the cellmates homicidal.
For those who gravitate toward long form journalism, the most popular story at New York Magazine's website (by total engaged time; that is, how many total minutes readers spent looking at each piece) was Andrew Sullivan's thoughtful essay that questions whether America is ripe for tyranny.
Another big ticket item at NYMag.com was “The 100 Jokes That Shaped Modern Comedy From the Marx Brothers to The Simpsons, Richard Pryor to Amy Schumer” by Jesse David Fox.
Rounding out the top three was national affairs editor at New York Magazine, Gabriel Sherman's incisive look at how Fox News women brought down Roger Ailes, arguably the most powerful and predatory media mogul in American television.
Unfortunately, no year in review is complete without reporting on some destructive weather calamity pounding the U.S.
Weather.com reports its most read story of the year was how Hurricane Matthew, the destructive tropical cyclone (a Category 5) clobbered the U.S., leading to 49 deaths, making it the deadliest Atlantic hurricane since Hurricane Stan in 2005.
Another popular item at Weather.com was its creative photo gallery, showcasing the world's weirdest and most amazing bridges; followed by Winter Storm Jonas, the crippling blizzard that slammed with a vengeance into the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, causing 50 deaths with a preliminary economic impact surpassing $850 million.
Most Read Stories at Other Sites
- OpenSecrets.org: The selection of Mike Pence as Donald Trump's running mate imposes fundraising barriers to the Republican ticket.
- FBI.gov: The FBI's recovery of underage victims of prostitution and drawing the public’s attention to the problem of sex trafficking at home and abroad. The domestic intelligence and security service recovered 82 sexually exploited juveniles along with arresting 239 pimps and other individuals.
- NFL.com: NFL owners in Houston in January voted 30-2 to ratify the St Louis Rams' relocation application for an immediate move to Los Angeles, while the Oakland Raiders withdrew their application for relocation with plans to work with the league toward a stadium solution.
- FoodNetwork.com: Healthy Weeknight Dinners was the Food Network’s top item that drove the most amount of page views, followed by its Top 50 Most Saved Recipes Gallery.
Year in Review: Search Engines/Social Media
Notable Deaths in 2016
Jan. 5 — Pierre Boulez: French composer, conductor and writer.
Jan. 10 — David Bowie: English singer, songwriter and actor.
Jan. 18 — Glenn Frey: American singer, songwriter and founding member of the rock band the Eagles.
Jan.26 — Abe Vigoda: American actor.
Feb. 12-13 — Antonin Scalia: Associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1986 until his death.
March 6 — Nancy Davis Reagan: American actress, and wife of the 40th president of the United States, Ronald Reagan.
March 23 — Ken Howard: American actor.
March 24 — Garry Shandling: American stand-up comedian, actor and writer.
March 29 — Patty Duke: American actress of stage, film and television.
June 3 — Muhammad Ali: American heavyweight boxing champion and social activist.
June 10 — Gordie Howe: Canadian professional hockey player.
June 12 — George Voinovich: Republican U.S. senator from Ohio (1999-2011), the 65th governor of Ohio (1991-1998) and 54th mayor of Cleveland (1980-1989).
July 16 — Nate Thurmond: NBA player.
July 19 — Garry Marshall: American film director, television producer, actor and creator of the ABC sitcom “Happy Days.”
Aug. 29 — Gene Wilder: American film and theater comic actor, screenwriter, film director and author.
Sept. 16 — Edward Albee: American playwright.
Sept. 28 — Shimon Peres: The ninth president of Israel, the eighth prime minister of the country and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Nov. 7 — Janet Reno: attorney general of the United States from 1993 until 2001.
Nov. 14 — Gwen Ifill, American Peabody Award-winning journalist, television newscaster and co-anchor of the “PBS NewsHour.”
Nov. 25 — Fidel Castro: Cuban revolutionary and politician who governed the Republic of Cuba as prime minister from 1959 to 1976 and then as president from 1976 to 2008.
Nov. 25 — Ron Glass: American actor, best known as Det. Ron Harris on the ABC sitcom “Barney Miller.”
Dec. 8 — John Glenn: American aviator, engineer, astronaut and U.S. senator from Ohio.
Dec. 13 — Alan Thicke: Canadian actor, songwriter and game and talk show host.
Dec. 15 — Craig Sager: Colorful sideline reporter for the NBA's television broadcasts.
Dec. 18 — Zsa Zsa Gabor: Hungarian-American actress and socialite.
— Bill Lucey
Dec. 19, 2016
