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[Update, 12:50, couldn't resist adding just one more, number 16]

At a party recently someone lambasted the media for playing up unimportant (read that: serious) news stories. The freebie papers in Switzerland were the target, with British tabloids and Fox TV in the US quickly added to the heap of sensationalist media. I made the remark, taken with much skepticism by others in the room, that like it or not the media often feed the public what it wants. I pointed out that when I ran stories on the disappearances of little girls Madeleine McCann of the UK and Ylenia Lenhard of Switzerland in GenevaLunch there was a clear spike in visits to GenevaLunch. Print editors see sales go up and online sites see visits rise when they run stories that are weird or spark curiosity. When we check our statistics we can see clearly which stories have been the most popular.

If you don’t believe me, test yourself and see if you match other readers online. Don’t pause to ask yourself which stories you should read, just skim this list and ask which of today’s stories in the mostly UK and US international media would you be tempted to read? And then go to the end to see which are among the most read, or at least the most e-mailed.

Then be really honest with yourself, which stories have you clicked on and read? Did you e-mail any of them, or don’t you want people to know you read some of them while you were supposed to be doing something more important?

If it makes you feel any better, I read all of them. I can smugly say it is part of my job, of course.

1. "Bill Murray faces drunk driving charge after golf cart cruise through Stockholm," International Herald Tribune
2. "Belching moose add to global warming," Yahoo news
3. "25 dead as storms collide in Midwest, Plains," CNN
4. "US Army major indicted on Iraq bribery charges," Reuters
5. "Facebook gets personal with ad target plan," Wall Street Journal
6. "Wild West lives on in rattlesnake murder plot," Reuters
7. "Texas executes 400th inmate," CNN
8. "Magazine retouches Sarkozy photo," BBC
9. "US missile shield is provocation: Austrian minister," Reuters
10. "Learning to cook, with time left to see Paris," New York Times
11. "Sarkozy’s uneven first 100 days," Financial Times
12. "Putin’s bare-chested photos set Russia abuzz," International Herald Tribune
13. "Boy is accused of sausage assault," BBC
14. "Lawyers gear up grand new fees," Wall Street Journal
15. "Bangladesh declares holiday to cool curfew tensions," AFP
16. US school suspends boy for sketching gun," The Age, Australia/AP

And I didn’t include the story about the man whose ex-wife doused his penis with vodka and set him alight. That was yesterday’s news from Reuters.

The answer: these stories were listed among their sites’ most popular or most e-mailed: 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14 (uncertain for 16). As for the Russian vodka and love lost tale, it has been zooming around the world, if running a Google search for it is any indication. It seems to have universal appeal, if that is the right word.

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