When I first started in the newspaper industry back in the early 1990s, editors and publishers would use a variety of tools to measure reader interest and habits.

We would publish detailed surveys in the newspaper, sometimes taking up 2-4 pages, promising readers a chance at lucrative prizes if they completed and returned them. There were surveys involving direct calling, and focus groups who simply marked with a red pen the articles and advertisements they paid attention to on a daily basis.

And of course, one of the best methods was simply tracking single copy sales. It’s fairly simple: the more exciting/appealing papers generated more sales.

Then came the Internet.

Through google analytics, newspapers now have an abundance of precise, measurable data about what readers like, and don’t like.

The basics are obvious, such as how many people read a specific story or look at a particular picture. What’s astounding though is how many more layers of data are available regarding reader habits.

Through just a few clicks, I can tell you how many people read the Journal online every day, how many read it on computers, phones and tablets, when they read it, where they read it, and how long they take to read any specific article.

I can tell you how many people come to The Journal via links on our Facebook page, and which specific search engine they may have gone through to find an article they read.

But the most interesting piece of information isn’t the fact we have readers in more than 120 countries or that most of our online traffic is from 8-9 a.m., when folks log on to their computers at work.

For me, the most interesting piece of information is which stories get the most clicks. Which stories do readers engage with the most. Which stories bring in the most eyes, because at our core, that’s what newspapers do: attract readers. We produce content that people want to read, which in turns creates a medium advertisers can use to sell their product to those same consumers.

And 90 percent of the time, the articles that generate the most interest are the ones most commonly labeled as “negative” or “bad” news.

It’s a general criticism that’s almost as old as newspapers: they are filled with negative news. Personally, I couldn’t even wager a guess how many times I’ve heard that comment levied directly at a specific paper I worked at or the industry in general.

In the past, when the criticism bothered me more than it should and I had more time than I do know, I would literally count the number of “good” stories compared to the “bad” ones, and typically, the positive outnumbered the negative by a 5-1 margin, a fairly substantial one to say the least.

What that didn’t account for though is the public’s insatiable appetite for the bad. In my 24 years working in newspapers, only once did the paper I worked at sell out every single copy printed. The lead story that day was about a commuter plane crash that killed 9 of the 11 passengers.

We had doubled the press run, anticipating the extra sales. It wasn’t enough to meet the demand.

With that in mind, six years later when a tornado ripped through the same town causing millions of dollars in damage and killing two people, I swore we wouldn’t sell out of papers. So we tripled the press run.

We sold all but 8 copies.

And now, the Internet has confirmed what those single copy sales always indicated: readers love negative news.

I recently pulled up the top ten stories read on the Journal’s website over a period of 30 days. Nine of them, including the first eight, were negative in nature. And curiously enough, the page that receives more visits than any other is the obituary page.

Is there any more negative news than someone’s death?

But in all seriousness, Facebook confirms this phenomenon as well. Last week, we posted an update when Miguel Vasquez was found guilty. Nearly 28,000 people read that post. By comparison, the New Ulm girls winning in the first round of the playoffs: 1,200 readers. Schell’s opens a new tasting room: 700 views.

And yet last week I also fielded a call from a reader who had a story idea so “we can get some good news in the paper.” He made his request two days after we published our Progress edition, a 30-page special section filled exclusively with “good” news.

It’s a strange dynamic that exists within the newspaper industry: the product is in fact filled with good news, even though readers don’t realize it, or consume it as voraciously as they do the bad news.

However, what is imperative though is how a responsible newspaper, or any media balances that strange demand.

In my opinion, a good newspaper is like a mirror and should simply reflect the community in which it exists. If there is “bad” news going on, the paper is obligated to report it in the same manner it should report the “good,” even if the readers don’t like it … as much.

——

Gregory Orear is the publisher of The Journal. His award-winning weekly column, What’s Going On, has been published in four newspapers in three states for more than 20 years. He can be contacted at gorear@nujournal.com.