One of the oldest journalistic clichés is that the crime story hits page one, but when the prosecutor drops all the charges or the accused is acquitted, the story hits the back page below the ads.
One of my nearest and dearest has a blog. She remarked a few days ago that the posts she thought were most deserving of attention got almost no views, while those she thought only mildly deserving got many more.
I discussed a variant of this phenomenon five (count ’em, five) years ago, in my blogpost “Go Figure,” 10/21/16.
Today, locked-down with no work to do, I looked back at my all-time stats, and found that my blogpost “Wow,” 7/1/16, is third among individual blogposts. But the sensational story that blogpost presaged evaporated the next year, as I chronicled in my blogpost “Unwow,” 4/6/17.
“Wow” has, to date, over 800 views. “Unwow,” 16.
I remember the remark of Ray Donovan, formerly United States Secretary of Labor, indicted for larceny and fraud. When, after he had resigned his post, he was acquitted on all counts two years later, he famously asked “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”
I do not know what to tell the person named in my blogpost.