What Does It Take To Have The ‘Most Read’ Story Of The Year?
You don’t need to be famous or have a massive platform. You just need to do what Alex Tizon did
There’s going viral — and then there’s what happened to Alex Tizon’s “My Family’s Slave” after it appeared in The Atlantic in 2017.
The story soon became “the most read, the most commented on, and the most forwarded piece in the magazine’s internet-era history,” the journalism teacher Sam Howe Verhovek writes in his introduction to Invisible People, a collection of Tizon’s articles. He adds:
“Remarkably, according to Chartbeat’s annual ranking of the one hundred most popular digital articles, it also became the most read English-language article on the Internet for all of 2017, consuming 58 million minutes of readers’ time — more than triple the combined reading time for the next most read piece.”
“My Family’s Slave” won a National Magazine Award, the highest honor in its field, and it achieved all of its distinctions without using a clickbait headline, BuzzFeed–style lists, or other devices that — writers are regularly told — lead to such impressive results.
How did it happen?
