Maureen Dowd loves to declare, in a bit of a bold-faced shill, that The New York Times is the most fun you can have for a dollar. I think she’s right, though, about newspapers in a broader sense. I’ve long loved my family’s morning routine of passing the Cheerios down the table along with the Cleveland Plain Dealer Sports section, silently crunching through granola while digesting the op-ed page. We trade sections as the meal progresses, offering recommendations on which articles are particularly worth reading and relating whether our favorite columnists have said anything particularly pithy today.
In college, there’s rarely enough time for breakfast, let alone for a leisurely media roundtable discussion, and that daily dollar for The Times (or The Washington Post) starts to look a little dear. I’ve established a new morning routine. I scan the lead stories on nytimes.com, usually terse rundowns of international conflicts or the further devolution of our country’s economic and political system. Once I’ve done my duty as an informed (if now slightly depressed) citizen, I scroll down to where the fun really starts: the most emailed list.
The most obvious utility of a most-emailed list is that, in theory, it points out the most interesting articles in the paper without forcing a cover-to-cover reading. Hard news almost never makes it onto the list, articles about “serious” topics tend towards in-depth analyses, while “fluff” pieces take up a disproportionate part of the top ten. When you stop and think about what Times readers consider the most interesting articles, a fascinating, if sometimes conflicted, picture of them begins to emerge. Imagining who exactly is digesting this content can be as intriguing as the articles themselves.
The Times is an interesting case study, since the company is fairly transparent about whom its product is marketed towards the wealthiest, most educated segment of the population. Despite what the demographics might indicate, though, readers are certainly not of one mind. Who are these people equally fascinated by a 36 hour sojourn in Iceland, “The Devil Wears Prada” and Bush’s policy on domestic wiretapping?
Sometimes the readers become a caricature of themselves�articles about real estate prices, for instance, often make their way onto the list, as do how-to pieces on protecting your investment. Editorials especially virulent towards the Bush administration are popular. And readers love emailing articles on education, especially anything that mentions the Ivy League, how to get your kid into a top-notch college or how out-of control the fight to get your kid into a top-notch college has become. The gender war, too, is being battled via email�the undisputed heavyweight champion of the most-emailed world, reigning for several weeks this summer, compared training your spouse to training Shamu.
Advice pieces, especially on new technology, are always popular, as are cultural zeitgeist-type features. Times readers are desperately in pursuit of cool articles from the Thursday Styles, which purports to chronicle that which is trendy, routinely crack the list. Leisure is huge. Dining and travel articles pop up all the time, but book and movie reviews rarely do�which, taken in conjunction with astronomically popular articles on the increasing rarity of vacations for the American worker and the difficulty of scheduling time for friends, suggests that there is an element of fantasy to that predilection.
The question of what compels someone to email an article is an arresting one�is the topic fascinating because it is familiar or foreign? Is everyone who emailed a recent chart-topper on what makes the wealthy go bankrupt truly rich? Why did I read an article on apartment prices in Manhattan when I’ve never lived there and probably never will? And why does a reader choose to email it to a particular friend�is this an issue of special gravity for them or just something that might lighten their morning?
There are plenty of news aggregates on the web, of course. But I don’t go to the most-emailed list for a concise summary of the news, nor do I go to see what the editors of the paper think is most newsworthy�that is easily discerned from the layout of the page. I go because reading the paper is, for me, an interpersonal affair and an escape. So I sit and eat my Special K and send my brother, ever-contemplating a hirsute existence, an article about the resurgence of beards. My wander-lusting but desk-bound sister emails me one about Paris on the cheap as she has her English muffin. And somewhere in Manhattan an investment banker with a secret passion for photography sips his coffee and sends his friend an article about the latest digital camera while a chemist in Chicago emails her friend in Berkeley one about the barriers faced by women in the sciences. Slowly they all creep up the list, and though I will never meet the man in Manhattan or the woman in Chicago and I know little about photography or science, their favorite articles eventually make it around the breakfast table to me.
