Pizza Rats, Haunted Houses And Costco: The Top Five Huddle Stories Of All Time
As Cherise Letson, Employee Number One, has been reminding us all month: Huddle is now five years old!
In honour of our fifth birthday, we’ve put together a list of the five most popular stories since the publication launched on September 8, 2015. As you’ll see from the list, you’re an eclectic group of readers with quirky, fun and serious tastes in stories.
1) New Brunswick’s Re-Opening Plan — A Draft Framework: Huddle readers love a steady diet of stories on new restaurants, bars and retail stores but it turns out you’re also community-minded policy wonks. In the spring, we published a two-part series by David Alston and Marcel LeBrun, tech entrepreneurs and thought leaders, on their vision for re-opening New Brunswick’s economy coming out of Covid-19. This piece turned out to be the most popular Huddle piece of all time, with their first one (Is New Brunswick Ready For ‘The Dance’?) not far behind. David and Marcel were also our guests on the first and most popular Huddle “Home Office” podcast to date: David Alston And Marcel LeBrun On ‘The Dance’.
2) New York Times Casually Slams Halifax, We Return The Favour: Around the office, this is affectionately known as the “pizza rat story.” In a 2015 New York Times Magazine feature on Ellen Page, the writer describes Nova Scotia as a region with a collapsed fishery and high unemployment. Halifax is described (dismissed) in the following way: “The city’s downtown wraps around a central hill; its North End was largely destroyed by a freak explosion nearly 100 years ago. The harbor is occasionally punctuated by breaching whales.” Huddle mocked the Times piece with its own description of New York, highlighted by the following line, “New York’s crushing mass of humanity is punctuated by more than 2 million rats, which are known to steal pizza and carry the plague.” Since the beginning Huddle has prided itself on defending the region’s honour, which has been popular with readers. Another top 10 piece with a similar tone: What Maclean’s Doesn’t Understand About New Brunswick.
3) New Brunswick’s 7 Most Haunted Places: What can we say? You love haunted houses. Perhaps The New York Times and Maclean’s are right: the Maritimes is a scary place to live.
4) Open For Business: The Covid-19 pandemic has been a challenging time for the region’s businesses, large and small. As a service to them and our readers who frequent those businesses, we launched an online directory to keep people informed on those that remained open, their service and hours of operation. The enormously popular directory now exists in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Northern Ontario.
5) Costco Announces It Will Open New Moncton Store: As I said in the beginning, Huddle readers love their retail stories, and none more than the news that a bigger and better Costco was going to open in Moncton in the fall of 2018. You love to shop there and it turns out it’s a good place to work too, the subject of another Huddle Home Office podcast: Why Can’t Everyone Pay As Well As Costco?
What is your favourite Huddle story of all time? Let us know: [email protected].