I know, I know. There's real, serious news to talk about today. Egypt is in flames. Almost anywhere could be next. It looks like the Egyptian army has just changed sides and joined the protestors, which effectively marks the end of the Mubarak government. But I've been covering the absurd popularity of news stories about people having sex with horses for a long time, dammit, and even today I'm not passing up this one.
On the BBC News website today, the most-read story is still (or one might even say again) an article about a man having sex with a horse. The Egyptian revolution - as it surely must now be called - stands in second place.
This is very far from being the first time a news article about humans having sex with animals has led the news agenda.
Back in 2005, perhaps the most notorious of these was the Seattle Times, whose Danny Westneat
ruefully admitted that not only was a story about a man having sex with a horse their most popular of the year, but that four of the Seattle Times’ top twenty stories that year covered the same horse sex story and that this was probably "the most widely read material this paper has published in its 109-year history". In 2006 BBC news bosses were left scraping around for an explanation for their story about
a Sudanese man forced to marry his goat remaining at the top of their "most emailed" chart for week after week, and
according to Media Monkey were reduced to blaming a conspiracy. And off-topic I know but back in 2007 one of the big news stories of the year was
a man who had sex with a bicycle.
The American Journalism review explored this phenomenon in depth in 2006, finding numerous examples and admitting that "stories about celebrities, sex, scandal and animals — or better yet, some combination of those subjects — have proved to be reliable lures at some papers' web sites". I thought perhaps it was a passing phase. And yet, here we are again. If you want to know what news people want to read - what they really, consistently, want to read more than seemingly any other topic - it's stories about people having sex with horses. I don't want to make any premature claims to have single-handedly saved journalism in the information age here, but I think we can at least agree that my latest research offers embattled newsrooms a clear path to profitability.
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