The 20 most read stories on irishtimes.com in 2020

• Date: 19 December 2020
• Published date: 19 December 2020
• Author: Patrick Logue
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

In The Irish Times, the annual email from our analytics team, with a spreadsheet attached, is a sure sign that it's time to get the "out of office" message crafted.

The spreadsheet contains a list of articles, usually 100, that have been the most popular among our readers and subscribers since January 1st. The stories are sorted under various headings: how many people read them, when they were published, who wrote them, what the story was about and so on. If somebody had asked me last February to predict what might be on that list I would most certainly have said the February general election, the November US election and maybe Brexit.

Coronavirus was the subject of 74 of the 100 most-read stories in 2020, all of the top 10 and 18 of the top 20.

Top of the list was Conor Pope's article featuring Irish retailers who were fighting for their survival and selling online during the second lockdown. Published on October 20th as "One hundred Irish retailers for all your online Christmas shopping", the article was updated several times and ultimately listed 400 online Irish retailers.

Second, and one of the small number of non-coronavirus articles at the top of the list, was Fintan O'Toole's piece on Donald Trump in April. Under the heading " Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again", O'Toole says the world has "loved, hated and envied the US. Now, for the first time, we pity it."

Una Mullally's article on Saturday September 9th about the experience of Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin in University College Dublin was one of the three articles in the top 20 list that did not relate to the pandemic. Under the title "Two years of harassment at UCD", one of Ireland's best-known academics tells Mullally of being repeatedly harassed by a professor over the course of two years. This article was 18th most-read in 2020.

The third non-COVID-19 piece in the top 20, in 19th place, was Jennifer O'Connell's column on Rebel Wilson and her "unrecognisable" weight loss photographs. "What kind of toxic society tells women that looking good means looking nothing like themselves? Would the ultimate 'weight loss success story' need to involve vanishing altogether?" asks O'Connell.

Ireland's momentous election is relegated to number 26 in the top 100 list, with Political Editor Pat Leahy's story of the incredible exit poll result which was announced at 10pm on Saturday February 8th. The Ipsos MRBI exit poll correctly predicted the outcome of the election: a...