Readers Choose Disaster Stories 

But what would our readers choose?

Since the articles in our magazine also appear on our website along with those articles written exclusively for our Online News Service, an analysis of online readers’ click statistics gives us some insights into what news events capture your attention.

While I didn’t actually sort through all the statistics available for some 13,000-plus articles that our readers chose to read online this year, two analyses of the 1,000 most read articles are eye-opening. These articles actually represented 80 percent of the traffic on our site.

After categorizing each of the 1,000 articles according to the news events they described, the first analysis simply ranked the topics based on the number of readers. Attempting to focus on topics related to breaking news events only, I excluded those topics that pool together the articles we publish to guide our readers through business management issues, such as those warning of the dangers of embracing—or not embracing—social media.

Given those constraints, here is the readers’ ranking:

#1 Catastophes

#2 National Flood Insurance Program

#3 American International Group

#4 Market Conditions

#5 Health Care Reform

#6 Deepwater Horizon Disaster

#7 Financial Services Reform

#8 Economy

#9 Contingent Commissions

#10 Mergers & Acquisitions

The list puts news about catastrophes and the National Flood Insurance Program at the top of the list, while our editors ranked those down near the bottom. And while our editors thought news about the elections was important enough to be included in NU’s Top 10 (on pages 13-24), readers were more interested in news about M&A activity, according to this first analysis. 

Recognizing some of these topics may be popular simply because of the volume of articles our reporters delivered about certain topics (we do churn out a lot of copy about cats and AIG), a second, perhaps more meaningful analysis ranks the topics by the average number of readers per topic.

This list is even more surprising:

#1 Toyota Recall

#2 National Flood Insurance Program

#3 Catastrophes

#4 Job Losses

#5 Deepwater Horizon Disaster

#6 Drywall

#7 Contingent Commissions

#8 Going Green Products Introduced

#9 Market Conditions

#10 Economy

Here, a small number of articles about the Toyota recall took top billing, and job losses, drywall and the introduction of green insurance products addressing liability issues beat our editors’ No. 1 and 2 picks—market conditions and the economy. In addition, credit scoring (#11) ranks above AIG (#12).

Putting the two analyses together, the message of both rankings seems to be that articles about hurricanes, earthquakes and floods captured the attention of NU readers in 2010 more than news about financial service reform and health care reform.

If we were to include some of our non-event/how-to articles in the analyses, then articles giving guidance about dealing with social media would trump contingent commissions as well.

In an early edition next year, NU will publish a list of the 100 most read articles by title, which is topped by an article titled “Agents Provide Little Client Joy, Customer Survey Finds.” In fact, if we expand our second readers’ choice analysis to include articles that are not driven by breaking news events, then agent/broker service issues outranked anything else we wrote about in 2010.

Susanne Sclafane

Managing Editor

Archived Issues

• Reserve Deficiency Report Sends AIG Stock Tumbling
• Auto Claims Spiking As Gas Prices Tank
• Construction Insurance Coverage: Building The Case for Service and Safety
• U.S. Risk Managers Should Follow Lead Of Europeans In Buying Credit Insurance
• Fitch: Insurance Market To See Underwriting Loss For ‘09