North of 50 million posts were served up for your reading pleasure (and, let’s face it, sometimes, reading terror) across the year. As we bid farewell to 2020, here are the 20 that got clicked on the most, countdown style.

20

A better visual breakdown of the 2020 election results

Remember the election? Neither. Here’s a brilliant way to jog your memory.

19

Everything you need to know about buying and making masks

Masks! A bookmark-worthy one from Angela Cuming.

18

What’s up with New Zealand’s housing market?

A perennial question, confronted by the NZIER.

17

All 142 biscuit flavours in New Zealand ranked from worst to best

A Madeleine Chapman classic.

16

The Side Eye: Weed versus Booze

A Toby Morris classic.

15

Every dairy lolly in New Zealand, reviewed and ranked

A Madeleine Chapman classic.

14

Three Auckland eateries linked to new Covid-19 cases

Remember these stories? There were plenty.

13

What time will we know the NZ election result – and what about the referendums? 

I confess, this was headlined with the search engine user in mind. But still, how about that election?

12

Fresh Google mobility data shows NZ’s lockdown behaviour remains consistent – with one regional exception

Duncan Greive on what the data told us about alert level compliance.

11

What you’re entitled to under the Covid-19 wage subsidy

News you can use from business editor Michael Andrew.

10

Live updates, November 5: US election – Biden closes gap in Georgia; Trump tries to stop vote count

Live updates, launched in the tumultuous news-avalanche days of peak Covid, have become a critical part of the Spinoff mix, and we welcome Stewart Sowman Lund to helm them. The most read of all wasn’t about New Zealand at all, however.

9

Bloomfield warns of ‘flashing orange’ alert as Auckland church cluster grows

This year we welcomed to the team Justin Giovannetti, our first press gallery appointment. Justin had a rare knack of finding and telling stories that were otherwise missed. Here’s one.

8

Covid-19: Every New Zealand case, mapped and charted

I’m constantly awed by Chris McDowall and his ability to visualise ideas in accessible, clear and creative ways. Through the weeks of edge-of-seat 1pm updates, Chris’s visualisations helped make sense of it all. This was the most read of the many posts.

7

The Side Eye: Viruses vs everybody

A brilliant, and timely, Side Eye from the inimitable Toby Morris, featuring a microbiologist you may be familiar with.

6

Review: Netflix’s Space Force crashes and burns with a laughless first season

An excoriating review from Sam Brooks.

5

What are the rules for lockdown in New Zealand?

In the midst of the Covid upheaval, we did our best to produce clear and useful explainers in a fast-moving crisis. This one, from Sam Brooks, was among the most popular.

4

The world is on fire: My message to New Zealanders on Covid-19

An impassioned and brilliant appeal by Siouxsie Wiles, shaking the doubts out of many, published in mid-March.

3

Down the rabbit hole with the Covid-19 conspiracists

As early as mid-March the disinformation super highway was congested. Emily Writes went in deep, and no one writes them quite like she does.

2

What does level two mean, and why does it matter?

It’s difficult to overstate the impact of super-collaboration Siouxsie Wiles and Toby Morris in 2020. This list would be a Toby and Siouxsie every second entry, so I’ve taken the ruthless decision to just include this one, the most popular, read in massive numbers in New Zealand and around the world. It included one of their most impactful and brilliant animations. This one:

1

The Truth about Adrenochrome

This one caught a Google wave, ranking high in search results served up for people looking to understand what was up with all the online talk about adrenochrome. Josie Adams’ enjoyable debunking hopefully set a few people straight. This piece produced extraordinary numbers, with around 2.5 million page views and counting, making it our most read piece ever. It was so popular, we published another post about how popular it was.

Happy new year!

It may surprise you to learn that not every article we publish is read by hundreds of thousands of discerning punters. Here are 10 reads from this year that we think warranted more click-love.

Tomorrow we publish the top 10 most-read posts of 2020. Today, as a curtain-raiser, we turn our attention to the stories that – through no fault of their own – slipped through the cracks of the internet, and which we think deserved to be read by more people.

In no particular order …

In the absence of noise, I hear things

During the first lockdown, Scotty Stevenson wrote this lovely short reflection on the things he was hearing in the silence.

Making up is hard to do

Another great read stemming from the lockdown, which prompted Karyn Henger to reach out to fix a treasured friendship that had been badly broken.

The case for a conscious post-Covid coupling of New Zealand and Tasmania

We have both been mocked hard by mainland Australians, wrote a New Zealander-turned-Tasmanian: “You as sheep lovers, us as ex-convict genetically deformed cousin-humpers. Why not join forces against our common enemy?”

The different types of cricket match, ranked

Spoiler: it’s definitely not three-team cricket, the ultra-confusing version of the game that Cricket South Africa tried to foist on us in June.

Ch-ch-change range: Finding the best bang for your buck in New Zealand

A lesser-read chapter in Mad Chapman’s food ranking canon: all the fast food restaurants’ ‘change ranges’, rated by value for money.

Remembering 0800 SMOKEY, the campaign which turned Auckland into the City of Narcs

The goal: to get cleaner-burning fuel into Auckland cars. The method: turning citizens against each other in a whistle-blowing free-for-all. Here, Josie Adams looks back at a very weird Auckland Regional Council advertising campaign.

Inside the doomed campaigns of Gareth Morgan, Colin Craig and Mike Lee

“‘Mike… fuck,’ says Jeremy Greenbrook-Held, drawing out the ‘fuck’ like someone with a story to tell.” So begins Stewart Sowman-Lund’s inside story of three of New Zealand’s most chaotic political campaigns.

The Side Eye: The tunnel, the lights

Early in the pandemic, Toby Morris travelled to Waitomo to discover how the loss of international visitors was affecting the tourism industry, zeroing in on the Stubbs family, who run rafting tours. Read to the end for some unexpectedly moving illustrations of the glow worm caves.

Little things lost

Just a really great essay by Linda Burgess about marriage and the things we love.

Remembering and forgetting

Sarah Catherall’s mother has suffered from Alzheimer’s for 14 years; it’s been four years since she last recognised her family. In this beautiful essay, Catherall writes about the long goodbye and the question she can’t stop asking herself: would Mum want to keep living this way?