Top Blog Posts, 5/30/09-1/2/10

Following are our most-viewed blog posts from May 30, 2009 through January 2, 2010, the entire period covered by our premium Statcounter subscription. Those seven months were the busiest in MPW's history and account for 40% of all page views on this blog.

1. Pols Party While Budget Burns
2. Montgomery College President Wanted for Arrest in Arizona
3. Delegate Sheila Hixson's Son Passes Away
4. How to Save Money on Your Electric Bill Right Now
5. A Voice from the Other Half: Montgomery College Part-Time Faculty Member Speaks
6. More Warnings of State Budget Apocalypse
7. MPW Senate Challenger Poll
8. Zina Pierre and the District 30 Dilemma
9. Hunk of the Hill Runs for Delegate
10. People with Developmental Disabilities at Risk of Losing Services
11. Is WMATA Management Starting to Crack?
12. MoCo Primaries to Watch, Part Three
13. The MACO Moment
14. Eli El's Domestic Abuse Record
15. Johnson Arrest Warrant Case Gets Stranger
16. Young Guns of MoCo, Part Two
17. Gazette Makes More Cuts
18. Tighten Your Belts!
19. Funniest Facebook Status of the Day
20. MACO Mushroom Cloud

The most-viewed posts are not necessarily the most consequential. As a set, they tend towards the tabloidesque (MACO), tales of the legally challenged (Brian Johnson, Zina Pierre and Eli El) and those promoted by politicians on Facebook (especially Saqib Ali, Cheryl Kagan and Sam Arora). If we were running this blog solely for the purpose of site traffic, it would resemble the National Enquirer. But while we enjoy gossip as much as anybody, we will continue to research difficult series like Economic Engine of Maryland, Free State GOP Fades to Black and Who are the Real MoCo Progressives in between the occasional Hump-or-Dumps.

MPW now has almost 2,800 posts going back through the summer of 2006. Those posts form an archive that can be accessed by voters through Google and other search engines, and many of them are certain to resurface as campaign material for the next election. One example of this is Tighten Your Belts, which details Council Member Duchy Trachtenberg's call for fiscal austerity after her return from a three-week taxpayer-financed trip during which she missed a substantial amount of council business. That post has been promoted on the home page of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 35 for months and has received more traffic from visitors to their site than it did when it originally went up. Savvy strategists will be sure to repeat their example with other posts.

We will update the above data every two or three months as the elections approach.