DataDownload: Your most clicked articles in 2020

5 min readDec 26, 2020

DataDownload: Your most clicked articles in 2020 A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser

Tick tock. The media world is on pause — which gave us a moment to look back at what we covered in this year of ________ (Fill in your own expletive here). The Media Lab likes hard problems, so this year called on us to level up. How about you? Did you do something extraordinary? We’d love to hear from you at Steve@NYCMediaLab.org.

Happy New Year everyone.

Best-
Steve

Steven Rosenbaum
Executive Director
The NYC Media Lab
Steve@NYCMediaLab.org A Look Back at 2020 Top Clicked Edition

Surprisingly, the most opened edition of 2020 was the very first of the year, sent on January 4th, 2020. That edition started with a sentence that feels exactly wrong and right as a prediction, at the same time:

Ok, say it very slowly. Twenty…Twenty. Sounds kinda weird doesn’t it. Well, I’m all in. 2020 is going to be big, frothy, important, and intense. Like the best rollercoaster you’ve ever ridden, if you’re into such things.

Top 10 Most Clicked Articles

Not so surprisingly, the two most clicked articles this year were about the pandemic. After that, we get a great mix of narrative journalism, data-driven storytelling, some media+tech piece, and even… a feature on a birding app (who knew?) Of course, it was you, dear reader, that helped compile this list. And we have to say, you have excellent taste.

1. How the Pandemic Will End — The Atlantic | March 26th, 2020

The Atlantic’s science writer Ed Yong listed four things that must happen quickly to avert worst-case pandemic scenarios: “rapidly produce masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment”; “a massive rollout of COVID-19 tests”; social distancing; and clear and effective measures.

2. The best, and the worst, of the coronavirus dashboards — MIT Technology Review | March 6th, 2020

MIT Technology Review ranked 10 COVID-19 dashboards, from Singapore’s clean, simple, and transparent dashboard, to the Hong Kong government’s clunky GeoCities-esque page.

3. Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Lost Notebook — WIRED | February 12th, 2020

The Wired piece focused on Levy’s early meeting with Zuckerburg in 2006, when the young CEO was still laying out the social network’s world-dominating plans — many of which were executed — in a series of notebooks.

4. The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI’s bid to save the world — MIT Tech Review | February 17th, 2020

OpenAI built its mission around safer AGI for humanity and open research. But MIT Technology Review’s investigative dive offered a different perspective: “a misalignment between what the company publicly espouses and how it operates behind closed doors.”

5. R2D2 as a model for AI collaboration — Alexis Lloyd | November 21st, 2020

VP of Product Design at Medium Alexis Lloyd presented a framework for thinking about the different ways we can interact and collaborate with machines, segmented into three archetypes: C3PO, Iron Man/Jarvis, and R2D2.

6. The New Corporate Campus — NY Times | October 12th, 2020

NY Times introduced its use of environmental photogrammetry for 3D scene reconstruction back in July. It was a great tech demo, but it’s with this FaZe Clan profile that we see the technology start to shine.

7. QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook, documents show — NBC News | August 10th, 2020

An internal investigation at Facebook revealed thousands of QAnon groups and pages with millions of followers, with the top 10 groups collectively amassing over a million members.

8. 4k, 60fps of Footage of from 1896 | February 3, 2020

A YouTuber took the 1895 short “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat” and upscaled the century-old video to 4k and 60fps.

9. How eBird Changed Birding Forever — Outside Online | December 4th, 2020

The eBird app has logged 860M observations from 597k users since 2002 — a collection that technically counts as one of the “world’s largest citizen-science projects,” with data used by researchers to create live migration forecasts.

10. Cause for hope amid NYC startups | April 23rd, 2020

When 60 companies applied to join a startup accelerator just four months ago, they were already ahead of the curve. We interviewed those 60 companies for the NYC Media Lab startup accelerator program, known as The Combine. Seven made it in.

What We Watched Oct 8: In Conversation With Andrew Yang

In October, Andrew Yang joined our Summit to discuss tech, income inequality, and the future of NYC. Now that he’s announced he’s running for Mayor, this conversation is all the more relevant.

42 min watch

Watch Now What We’re Listening To Put A Fork In It — Annie Share & Pamela Covington

2020 is 86-ed! In this episode, stories of food and celebration. For more information on how to help food-insecure folks this year, head to themoth.org/extras.