It’s the most wonderful time of the blogging year! Time to look back at the accumulations of the past year. Last year, I posted a list of top 2010 Lake Highlands Advocate stories, from the magazine and blog, based on reader and co-editors’ feedback and personal opinion.
This year, instead, we took a look sheerly at the numbers. The following are the web entries that people visited most. I don’t know that all of ’em can be touted as our best or most in-depth journalistic endeavors (which is why I use the word “accumulation” rather than “accomplishment”) but they are the items that caught your eye or struck a nerve.
Numbers 10, 9 and 8 are, no surprise, focused on one of our most popular topics, Lake Highlands Town Center. This Update on Lake Highlands Town Center, a post about town center design changes and Sprouts’ “full focus” on Lake Highlands Town Center, all made the top ten, while Prescott’s reaction to said Sprout’s post and this piece on the state of Lake Highlands retail in general, were also quite popular.
7. Last summer we gathered several members of the Lake Highlands community for a roundtable discussion and posed the question, Where is Lake Highlands, TX? We never really came up with an exact answer, but it sure made for an enlightening discussion.
6 and 5. We care about food and, as importantly, places where we can eat food and, in some cases, even drink beer. When Go 4 it Sports Grill opened in old Blockbuster spot and when Atomic Pie came to Lake Highlands, we all perked up.
4. When the Lake Highlands High School baseball team smeared Samuell High 54-0, some wondered if the Wildcats went too far.
3. The saddest story I have reported this year was the one about young Andrew Green, who was run over and killed on a Saturday morning. You can expect more reporting from us on the unsolved case early next year.
2. Though we have the talented Gary Dowell regularly writing them, movie reviews are not exactly the reason people visit the Advocate website, so we are not really sure why last summer’s review for Cowboys and Aliens was our second most popular post of the year.
1. The most viewed post of the year was about Lake Highlands’ Jason Frappier capital murder charge. Later, we reported that he was not indicted.
A couple (feel good) honorable mentions:
Every year, my favorite story to work on is our annual project, which includes video and photography, on outstanding graduating seniors. We find high schoolers who have overcome tremendous odds in order to graduate and become successful. Meeting these kids usually makes me want to become a better person and this year was no exception.
Another magazine project that deserves mention is Best Pets 2011. The photo shoots brought a lot of joy, laughter, yelling and yelping into the Advocate studio and there were some touching tributes that revealed just how important animals can be in our lives.