Sudanese goats as popular as Seattle horses with discerning online news readers

Moving the news online has brought a number of benefits to both publishers and readers, perhaps amongst the most important being the facilities publishers have online for seeing which of their stories are most popular with readers. Ask readers what they want from a paper and they may tell you many things: news, current affairs, affairs of state, political commentary. Review which stories they actually click on or email to their friends and you see a very different (and more strictly accurate) story. Such are the limitations of market research.

Early in June I reviewed the efforts of several online news organisations to explain the data they were gathering as to their most popular stories, reaching much the same conclusion as the American Journalism Review - from the Seattle Times to Slate to Chile's Las Ultimas Noticias, inconsequential tales of sexual misadventure (especially those involving animals) enjoyed far the greatest popularity. I was amused, therefore, to see in yesterday's Media Monkey that the BBC was scraping around to account for the wild popularity of its story about a Sudanese man who was forced to marry his goat. The BBC website's world editor Adam Curtis concluded that "it seems to be a fine example of the viral nature of the web". Fair enough, as far as it goes. But the more data we see published about the relative popularity of news stories points us to the conclusion that it is precisely this sort of news story that always experiences this sort of viral explosion. It's not, as the BBC would innocently maintain, that this happens to be merely another example of the viral dissemination of a news story by the web. This is yet another example of the sort of story that always seems to be involved.

I am of course eager to hear counter-examples of any "hard" news stories that have enjoyed any sort of similar viral popularity. Anyone?