M50 part III and top news stories of 2017

So as I was thinking about this post, I found a local news story on the top stories of the year.  I thought, now that would be a good thing to fill in on an M50 post!  So I went looking for the top news stories of 2017, figuring that every national media source would have something by the point I started looking (AKA NYE afternoon).

Not really.  There were a ton of "specialized stories"- top fill-in-the-blank stories of the year.  The top "undercovered stories" (it was an LA Times story, so I skipped); the top stories in Malaysia (!); in the Baptist Church, in IT, at Marvel studios, in tech, in sports, at Disney World;  even the top stories of the year for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (no joke).  But was there anything like I was looking for?  Well, kinda...


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One of them was not the story of scandal told by the Orwells...

..who landed They Put A Body In The Bayou at #22 for 2017.  And let's not forget my favorite story of the year- about a letter from Elvis and a #1 that never was...

...that gave Wayne Newton the #28 of 2017 for The Letter.

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So what I found that was even slightly of a general AND national level consisted of NBC News, the AP, Google's most trending and the NYT's most read.  Between the four of them, here are their somewhat combined efforts:

#1- Hurricanes.  This got inflated a bit, as while NBC and AP combined all four storms as an item, Google had all 4 storms trend (with Irma being their top trend of the year), and 2 of the NYT stories referenced Irma.

#2- The massacres in Las Vegas and Texas.  NBC combined, NYT had stories on both, and LV was their #1.

#3- The #MeToo movement and sexual harassment.  NYT had stories on both Weinstein and Lauer.  Perhaps not surprisingly, NBC mentioned the hashtag but not Lauer.  AP had this at the top of their heap.

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I would like to mention we do have one song that would seem to fit in with the hurricane stories-

Puddle Of Mudd's cover of Gimme Shelter at #21.  Weather around here right now, though, is more in tune with the #26-

Melody's Echo Chamber and Crystallized.

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Back to the top stories:  A quartet of stories had 3 mentions each.  They would be: World terrorism, dealing with refugees and other "culture war" issues (as NBC put it), North Korea, and the Solar Eclipse.

The only other stories that got more than one mention were about Trump and the Mueller "I've got NOTH-ing" probe.  There was a group of one mention items, including the rising price of BitCoin (which I still don't understand), Obamacare's imminent demise, the tax overhaul, the last Mayweather fight (NYTs #2, if you can believe it), a tear jerking story about a dying woman who made up a dating profile for her soon-to-be-single hubby (also NYT), and, believe it or not, the FB event of the year, the birth of April The Giraffe's baby  (Google's #2 trend behind DACA).


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Tom Jones would say, "I Know" ( his hit at #27) that that isn't much of a list, but perhaps, as Moon Taxi might have said...

...we might have had our expectations Two High (their #25 song on the list).  So I tried an alternate plan...


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Since the path of my search was littered with local sites giving THEIR top ten stories, I thought it might be interesting to take a few of them and shake them down.  So I picked ten local news sites around the nation- including the FTW one that started all this- combining their stories into general categories to see what kind of story was making their lists.

1- Local politics, 16 stories.  Some surprise there, huh?

2- Crime and murders, 12.  A good half of FTWs stories fit this profile.

3- Public works, 8.  Basically we built that, we aren't building that, we tore that down.

4- A tie between accidents (AKA anything bad that had a limited impact) and disasters (same on a larger scale) with 7 each.

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The last four from this set of the M50:

...the Old 97's at #30 with Good With God...

...Alvvays at #29 with In Undertow...

...The Japanese House at #24 with Somebody You Found....

...and Plume Of Feathers with Rhyl Love at #23.



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6- A tie between child abuse/murder stories and local sports items at 5;

8- A five way tie at 4 between sex crimes, school issues (one station had a market on these, including a high school whose students went out on strike to keep their coach from being fired by the superintendent, and a principal in that same district who did a resignation-suicide doubleheader that seems to have also been laid at the superintendent's feet), local talent, national politics, and the drug epidemic.  Thank God we're making it all legal, that'll help.  In about ten years, that's how we'll solve the sexual assault issue, just watch.


Only about 6 "feel-good" stories out of 50, though.  We had the big Addison Agen on The Voice deal, but she was surrounded on the poll by 7 shootings, 5 murders, and 2 suicides.



Happy New Year- hope you survive, I guess.