Introducing the SmartNews Top 5 Report: A Weekly Ranking of America’s Most Popular News Stories

By Jason Alderman, SmartNews Communications

SmartNews is rolling out a new tool for publishing and communications industry leaders – or anyone who loves the news as much as we do. 

Our “SmartNews Top 5 Report” uses our unique insights to determine the 5 most-read news storylines in the U.S. of the past week. Starting today, we will post these top 5 stories on LinkedIn, Threads and X every Friday. Think of it as the Billboard chart for the most popular news in America.

Only SmartNews is able to create this kind of ranking that shows what news topics Americans care the most about because we have millions of users from across the country who read articles from thousands of different media outlets that span the political spectrum. What’s trending on X or the top stories for any given news outlet doesn’t tell the full story; it just says what that small segment of the population is focused on. The trending stories in The Atlantic are very different from the most-read stories in The New York Post because their audiences are so distinct. 

Here’s how we do it: The Top 5 Report looks at the 650,000+ individual articles available in the U.S. edition of the SmartNews app over the past week to determine which ones are the most read. From there, we use AI to cluster those individual articles by topic to choose the biggest storylines. Our ranking tool isn’t for the most-read individual article, but instead for the bigger picture about what news topics have the most views. 

For instance, there might be 5,000 separate articles written about a presidential debate. We pull all those articles together and see how many times each was read to determine how to rank the overall story about the debate. Then, we will compare that to the 2,000 articles written about a new development in the war in Ukraine to see how many times those articles were viewed in the week. 

This week the top five news stories in America are:

1) Democrats rally behind Harris and Walz in swing state tour kickoff

2) Kamala Harris selects Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate

3) Simone Biles earns silver in final Olympic event

4) Kamala Harris set to announce VP pick ahead of pivotal campaign tour

5) Three Americans freed in landmark prisoner exchange with Russia

This shows how our news-focused technology allows us to differentiate between topics that others might crudely categorize as “politics” or the “presidential election.” 

Our goal with the SmartNews Top 5 Report is to give publishers, advertisers, journalists, academics, PR pros, and news junkies alike a clear window into what the entire country is reading. By providing real-time insights into the most-read news stories, we help publishers tailor their content strategies, advertisers target their campaigns more effectively and journalists understand public interest trends better.

SmartNews has readers from every corner of America and every political stripe, providing unmatched insights into national news consumption. With this new benchmark, the debate about what news topics America truly cares about is over. We have the definitive data and we will share it each Friday, just as we bring vital news to millions of readers every day. 

We invite you to follow us on LinkedIn, Threads and X to stay updated with the weekly Top 5 Report and join the conversation about the nation’s most-read news stories. Your feedback is valuable to us, so please share your thoughts and let us know how we can make this tool even more useful for you.