Community Corner
Most-Read Stories of 2013: Batavians Love Hard News
These eight hard-news articles are the top-viewed posts from 2013.
One thing I've learned about covering two Patch towns for the past six months or so is that each community has its own taste, interests and points of view. A story that generates a lot of unique visitors and page views in one town doesn't have such a big impact in another town.
On the Batavia Patch Facebook page, it seems as if I'll get a lot more participation when I ask a question of readers than I will in Geneva. On Batavia Patch, readers are passionate about certain topics, including downtown development and schools. On the flip side, and as a bit of a surprise, sports hasn't done as well in Batavia — in terms of page views and UVs — as I would have expected in such a great sports town.
All of that is observation and a bit subjective, based as much on what I've noticed as it is on data.
But from a purely objective, numbers-gathered examination, one thing is for sure: You folks love your hard news.
Of the top eight most-read Batavia Patch articles of 2013, all are in the category of Police & Fire, and most were breaking news stories. In a few cases, it didn't even make a difference whether the news happened in Batavia.
Why show you the top eight, rather than five or 10 or 50? Because eight stories made it above the 4,000 page-view threshold we arbitrarily set for this article.
Click on the headlines below to read the full articles, listed in order of most-read (big numbers for the No. 1 item) to least. It might not be a happy-face trip down memory lane, but it's surely a compelling one.
