For the past two weeks tbnewswatch.com has brought you our annual special feature we like to call the Look Back. We recapped every month, highlighting stories dominated headlines. After that we told you what we believed were the most important stories of 2012.
Today, we do something a little different.
Below are the stories that were the most read on tbnewswatch.com throughout 2012.
We didn't put an editorial board together to determine this list, nor did we ask reporters and editors at Dougall Media to submit a vote. For this list we looked at the raw data and put together a list of top news stories as decided by you -- the reader.
Most Read Stories Top 10:
10. Helping Hand
Jessica Sharpe was horrified when she awoke to an East End neighbourhood full of flooded basements.
But Sharpe didn't suffer the same fate many of her neighbours did. In what became the first major showing of compassion following the May 28 flood, Sharpe offered her dry home as a make-shift drop in centre.
9. Lightning strikes: Whalen Building turret shattered
One eyewitness said it looked and felt like a missile had struck the century-old Whalen Building in Thunder Bay’s north core.In fact it was a lightning bolt that hit the terra cotta-faced structure, ripping apart a turret sitting atop the building and scattering debris into the streets – and through car windshields – on St. Paul Street below.
8. Boy attacked
Dante Mekanak had gone out to meet his friends at Tarbutt Park on a Saturday afternoon. He climbed over hockey boards at the Westfort park, unaware there were dogs in an enclosed rink area. A man and six dogs were on the other side.
The boy was allegedly attacked by a larger dog and required reconstructive surgery on his face at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre.
Police say an inmate serving time at the Thunder Bay District Jail operated a multimillion-dollar drug organization from his prison cell.
Everyone wanted to know who in the city had won the $50 million jackpot in April, so when a headline was posted titled "Winners revealed" readers quickly followed.
5. House explodes: Resident hospitalized following morning blast
An explosion will get anyone's attention and this was no exception. A Thunder Bay man was said to be lucky to be alive after an explosion ripped through his St. Clair Avenue home one early morning.
4. Significant arrests
City police said they believed they had struck a significant blow to the local drug trade by arresting several 'top players,' including the alleged head of the criminal organization.
Thunder Bay Police Service officers, in conjunction with the OPP, RCMP, the Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service and the Anishnabek Police Service executed arrest and search warrants, arresting six people.
The scope of the arrests and allegations had people in the city talking. The matter is still before the courts.
We already know that people were interested in learning who had won the $50 million Lotto Max jackpot, but it appears the mystery was more exciting to readers than the big reveal.
When the May 28 flood struck, we asked our readers to send us photographs so that we could have a broader view of the destruction residents were dealing with.
We suspected at the time that tbnewswatch.com users would be interested in seeing what fellow readers were dealing with, but we didn't expect it would become our second most viewed page of the year.
http://www.tbnewswatch.com/news/211833/Your-view-Flood
The May 28 flood being our most read story of 2012 probably comes as no surprise.
But when a state of emergency was declared by the City of Thunder Bay, Oliver-Paipoonge and Conmee townships, it didn't just become our most read story of the year. In less than two hours, news of the flood had become the most read tbnewswatch.com page ever.
