The top clicks on our website for a year can show us what’s important to the community and what draws interest: This year, videos about Trump came out on top, followed swiftly by a slew of articles about the University of Oregon Bach Festival’s firing of artistic director Matthew Halls, and, of course, our ever-popular letters page made it in the top ten. (We only included the top articles in this list though). Check out our top ten hits from 2017.
1. Our top spot goes to the King of America, Donald Trump. This blog post shows the hilarious European response to Donald Trump’s election and had our staff rolling on the floor laughing.
2. Our second most popular article this year broke the news that Matthew Halls had been fired from the UO Bach Festival. This revelation shocked many in the arts community, and drew thousands to our website.
3. Bob Keefer’s follow-up article covered a different firing at the Bach Festival — that of Linda Ackerman. It’s a tale of palace intrigue and drama within the festival.
4. Kratom, an herbal painkiller, faced some legal limbo this year and gained a spot at fourth most viewed article on our website.
5. Meerah Powell’s exposé of the hypocrisy of white Eugene drew a lot of ire from white citizens and a lot of support from citizens of color — as you can read in the comments. With new revelations coming out about local neo-Nazis almost weekly now, it’s a great time to revisit this moving piece.
6. This post about an attack on EW’s building got a lot of attention, letting us know the community cares about us and about crime. We did find the guy, by the way.
7. Bach is back at slot number seven, this time outing some hypocrisy in a press release from University of Oregon.
8. Rape is a horrifying thing, and even more horrifying when not met with justice.
9. Portland area shock jock Dino Costa was fired from KXTG after EW editor Camilla Mortensen exposed that he had called for protesters to get run over by a car while protesting. No one blinked an eye at the time, but after the fatality at Charlottesville, Costa faced the consequences.
10. This post from August predicted the fall of the Bach Festival — a fate that EW Arts Editor Bob Keefer still predicts.
Other contenders that came close included the blog about our newspapers being burned because of an antifa related cover story by reporter Kelly Kenoyer, the fate of the Oregon Country Fair’s Story Pole, several blogs about Bethany Sherman of OG Analytical being outed as a white supremacist, and our cover about the Facebook page, Lane County Mugshots Uncensored, by staff writer Rick Levin. It’s been a great year of reporting for us at EW. Here’s hoping next year is as exciting and inspiring.