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On September 1, 1948, actor Robert Mitchum was arrested for weed possession at a Los Angeles “reefer resort.” He was initially sentenced to one year in prison. The period of service was reduced to 60 days and he served 50 days.

On September 24, 2021, I wrote it as the article of the week in history in the Vancouver Sun. Three years later, about 100 to 200 readers per month still read it.

This may not sound like a lot, but over time it adds up. According to the content analytics company Parls.ly used by Postmedia, just over 2,000 people viewed the story online between December 16, 2023 and December 16, 2024.

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Pars.ly calls this an “evergreen” story.

“Evergreen pages tend to retain a significant portion of their initial traffic long after publication,” it says.

In other words, most stories disappear a few days after publication, but others maintain a stable readership. How readers will find the story remains unclear. I suspected that the Mitchum article appeared as a footnote on his Wikipedia page, but that was not the case.

Maybe it’s on a Robert Mitchum fan site or a pro-marijuana website. Maybe someone just searched for “Mitchum” and “Reefer.” But as a writer, I find “evergreen” stories gratifying – it gives them a second chance to gain an audience.

According to Pars.ly, 817,000 people viewed my stories in the year ending December 16th.

My most popular evergreen story was the one about the Titanic, published on April 6, 2021. It has had nearly 3,000 views in the last year, suggesting the public’s never-ending fascination with the doomed ocean liner.

Why does this story continue to do well? Possibly because it details what was said about the Titanic disaster, which is quite different from what you would expect.

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The Vancouver World’s first headline on April 15, 1912 read “Sinking of the Titanic: No Life Lost.” Another World headline read: “Passengers transferred to Cunard liner Carpathia – all now safe.”

The province’s headline was a little more ambivalent: “Titanic sinks, but no lives will be lost.” Believe it or not, the province had an ad for the Titanic and her sister ship Olympic on the day they sank.

The April 15th World had the motto “The Paper That Prints The Facts” under its logo. But it was dropped on April 16, when the newspaper’s headlines read: “There is now no hope for other Titanic survivors” and “The death list grows more horrific by the hour.”

Evergreen stories tend to be local, such as a May 14, 2023 feature on the 50th anniversary of MacLeod’s Books (which was my 76th most popular online story this year) and a June 26, 2021 requiem for the popular seafood restaurant The Only (that was number 82).

People are still reading about flamboyant restaurateur Frank Baker (originally published October 14, 2022), the rum-running Reifels (July 6, 2018), and the health problems of Terry and Susan Jacks of the Poppy Family (September 21, 2016 ). ).

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A week in the March 3, 2017 story about Pierre Trudeau’s marriage to Margaret Sinclair in 1971 is still drawing readers. Major international events also always remain relevant, such as the column “Adolf Hitler commits suicide, Benito Mussolini is executed” from April 24, 2020.

The dictators died two days apart, and the news appeared on May 1, 1945. The Sun ran a photo of Mussolini after he had been executed and shackled in Milan, alongside the story of the death of the leader, one of the most memorable front pages in the history of the newspaper.

Still, Hitler, Titanic and Robert Mitchum are pretty well known. Silent film star Marie Prevost was once famous, but disappeared from public memory after her death on January 25, 1937.

Then, in his 1959 book Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger brought to light a grisly rumor that Marie’s body had been partially eaten by her dachshund. Her tragic story became a week in history on January 27, 1917, and seven years later it has been viewed over 1,100 times online.

The moral is that interesting stories tend to find an audience. This year, a story about Caddy Cadborosaurus, the Vancouver Island sea monster, failed to achieve major sales when it was published on February 9th. However, it now has over 1.8 million page views – a few people seem to read it every day.

You can’t keep a good sea monster under control.

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