Our Most Interesting Stories Of 2022
The Saturday Huddle is a weekly column that features opinion, analysis and reflections on Huddle stories, podcasts and business news in the region. Trevor Nichols is Huddle’s editor, based in Halifax.
I spent quite a bit of time over the last few weeks combing through Huddle stories from the past year.
There’s not a lot of opportunity for time off in the news business. One way news editors like me try to give our teams a break at year’s end is by putting together “best of” lists that don’t require quite as much work as a traditional news story but still give our readers interesting content.
I hope you enjoyed these looks back at our most-read stories of 2022 or at least found some interesting tidbits in them.
For me, these lists are fascinating.
Our most-read stories of the year always reveal so much about the interest, anxieties, and big events that stirred you, our readers, over the past year.
Every year, I’m amazed by how every one of these stories connects in some way to your profound concern for, and interest in, the street-level changes in your communities.
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Our most popular story of the year covered the fast-food joint Popeyes opening in Halifax. Sure, it’s a story about an international franchise, but your interest in it was deeply rooted in how its opening affected your community: the obvious effect of hundreds of cars snarling traffic in the area for days, to the more subtle way the new franchise represents how your city and its economy is growing and changing.
Many of the rest of the stories you gravitated towards similarly revealed your hunger for information about the new businesses and developments shaping your communities.
But behind almost all those developments were stories about hard-working entrepreneurs, members of your community, pursuing their passions and trying to make a go of it.
I love seeing how interested you were in these people and their stories, and I’m glad we could help bring them to you.
It’s also fascinating to see how, over the past year, readers have become more interested, and in some ways more critical, of the powerful businesses and organizations influencing your economic reality.
I saw a big uptick in interest this year in stories that turned a critical eye on big business: things like our reporting on Sobeys boss Michael Medline’s wild comments, Patagonia bullying a local brewery, and contractors taking advantage of an unstable housing market.
Our philosophy at Huddle has always been that “Business Is Good.” But to be good, businesses must “do” good things. It’s encouraging that you want us to keep telling you when they might not be living up to that.
While discovering our most-read stories of the year is always fascinating, I had far and away the most fun compiling this year’s “honourable mentions.”
These are stories we wrote that weren’t necessarily our most read but that, for whatever reason, our team had a spot for. Some were important, investigative work we thought deserved more attention; some were particularly interesting or thought-provoking feature stories; some were columns we wrote for this newsletter we were proud of.
If you do go back and look at our Top 10 lists for 2022, I’d encourage you to pay special attention to those honourable mentions because they tell you a lot about the stories our team values and wants to tell.
In 2023, we will continue bringing you the stories that you have shown us you want to hear. And we will also keep finding stories that delight and interest us as well.
But, for now, I am going to try to sneak in a few days of actual rest and enjoy the last few days of 2022. On behalf of our whole team at Huddle, Happy New Year everyone, and we’ll see you in 2023.