My Most Popular Posts of 2011

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All the cool kids are doing two things at the end of the year. The first is a top ten list of most popular posts. I managed to figure out how to find this information from our Google Analytics account, and I’m so proud of myself that I’m going to share the results. Here are my highest traffic posts of 2011:

Of course, this is all a bit random since a high-traffic post is usually just a marker that the MoJo powers-that-be highlighted it or that some other high-traffic blog happened to link to it. Unfortunately, my Google Analytics skillz are just barely good enough to generate this list, not good enough to figure out who my top referrers are. Maybe next year.

The second thing that seems to be the rage this year is a review of the past year’s posts to highlight my biggest mistakes. Unfortunately, my memory is nowhere near good enough to do this without help, and the Mother Jones archives aren’t set up to allow quick browsing of past posts. So this one is technologically out of reach for the moment. Feel free to nominate my worst boners in comments, though.

And now, just because this was so much fun, here are the next ten highest traffic posts of the year. Enjoy.

Altogether, this is a pretty wide ranging bunch of favorites. But if you’re looking for posts about the euromess, I’m afraid none of them made the top 20. Just not a very popular topic, apparently, and one where you really have to read lots of posts to get a good picture of what’s going on anyway. But for what it’s worth, here are the top two:

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Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

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