Call it the tweet heard round the world, or at least halfway across the country. On June 23, Alex Kennedy of Basketball Insiders tweeted that the Portland Trail Blazers might be close to a deal with the Philadelphia 76ers to get a second round pick in the NBA draft. Blazers beat writer Erik Gundersen followed up with a blog post which got shared on social media, drawing more than 60,000 people to the Blazer Banter blog.
And that is how that blog post become the most-read story on columbian.com in 2015, topping two more Blazers stories, a La Center high school student using a fake bomb to ask someone to the prom (we aren’t making this up, folks), a popular pastor stepping down from the pulpit at a Vancouver church, a shooting in Hazel Dell, a horrible car crash, a pot bust and an attempted suicide that closed the I-5 bridge.
The top 10 most viewed stories differed greatly, though, from readers’ picks for the top 10 news stories of the year, largely because the most-read stories typically gain big audiences from social media, bringing readers to columbian.com who aren’t frequent readers or who may live outside the local area (such as NBA fans who follow the Sixers). We recently asked readers to select 10 of 25 stories and nearly 160 voted, selecting Clark County councilor David Madore’s leadership as the top story of the year, though the rise in homelessness and the proposed oil terminal at the Port of Vancouver weren’t far behind.
Other stories on the readers’ top 10 list included the affordable housing crunch, the fireworks debate fueled partly by this year’s drought, the growing marijuana industry and reporter Aaron Corvin’s examination of the Port of Vancouver’s secrecy surrounding the proposed oil terminal.
