Five years ago today, The New York Times introduced The Upshot with the aim of examining politics, policy and everyday life in new ways. We wanted to experiment with formats, using whatever mix of text, data visualizations, images and interactive features seemed best for the subject at hand.
Other ideas fizzled: It turned out people were not all that thirsty for a topical cocktail recipe every Friday afternoon.
Forgive our sentimentality. But on this anniversary, we’d like to showcase some of our most successful work — using a few different measures of “success.” Happy clicking, and thank you for reading.
The articles that follow weren’t always the biggest hits with readers (though some certainly were) and they didn’t necessarily win journalism awards (though a few did). What they have in common is that, in the subjective judgment of our team, they helped people understand the world better, shedding light on some important recent trends. When we think of work that is very “Upshot,” it’s links like these that come to mind most.
These are the articles and interactive features that attracted the biggest readership: in some cases tens of millions, as people tended to share them on social media.
News professionals have devoted countless hours on what makes something popular, and while there are no simple answers, a commonality for us has been that many of these stories have addressed aspects of identity: where we come from, what we eat, how we talk, for example.
People also like thinking about what they would do if they won the lottery, and keeping up to date on whom President Trump has insulted lately.
Why describe how the Fed’s interest rate increases affect the economy when you can build a room-size Rube Goldberg device? Which presidential candidate’s language has the most in common with a given literary classic? Can you detect how long it takes a food fad to go from unknown to passé by counting its appearances in the Times archive? Many of these links answered an odd question or framed a traditional topic in a unique way. We hope to keep The Upshot at least partly weird for many years to come.
from Best News Viral http://bit.ly/2vhwmfV
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