This Week in History: The Titanic, Robert Mitchum go evergreen

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On Sept. 1, 1948, actor Robert Mitchum was busted for possession of pot at a “reefer resort” in Los Angeles. He was initially sentenced to a year in jail. It was reduced to 60 days, and he served 50.

On Sep. 24, 2021, I wrote it up as a Week In History item in The Vancouver Sun. Three years later, about 100 to 200 readers per month are still checking it out.

This may not sound like a lot, but over time, it adds up. Between Dec. 16, 2023 and Dec, 16, 2024, just over 2,000 people viewed the story online, according to the content analytics firm used by Postmedia, Parls.ly.

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Pars.ly calls this an “evergreen” story.

“Evergreen pages tend to maintain a significant portion of initial traffic long after publishing,” it notes.

In other words, most stories fade away a few days after they are published, but others retain a steady readership. How readers find the story is anyone’s guess. I suspected the Mitchum piece appeared as a footnote on his Wikipedia page, but it didn’t.

Maybe it’s on a Robert Mitchum fan site, or a pro-marijuana webpage. Maybe somebody just searched “Mitchum” and “reefer”. But as a writer, I find “evergreen” stories gratifying — it gives them a second chance to get an audience.

According to Pars.ly, 817,000 people viewed my stories in the year ending Dec. 16.

My most popular evergreen story was on the Titanic, that was published on April 6, 2021. It had almost 3,000 views in the last year, which suggests the public’s never-ending fascination with the doomed ocean liner.

Why does this story continue to do well? Possibly because it details what was said about the Titanic disaster as it happened, which is far different than you would expect.

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The Vancouver World’s first headline on April 15, 1912 was “Titanic Sinking: No Lives Lost.” Another World headline read “Passengers Transferred to Cunard Liner Carpathia — All Are Now Safe.”

The Province headline was a little more ambivalent: “Titanic Sinking, But No Lives Will Be Lost.” Believe it or not, The Province had an ad for the Titanic and its sister ship Olympic the day it sank.

The April 15 World had a motto underneath its logo, “The Paper That Prints The Facts.” But it was dropped on April 16, when the paper’s headlines were “No Hope Now Of Other Titanic Survivors” and “Death List Grows More Appalling Hourly.”

Evergreen stories tend to be local, such as a May 14, 2023 feature on the 50th anniversary of MacLeod’s Books (which was my 76th most popular online story this year) and a June 26, 2021 requiem for the beloved seafood restaurant The Only (which was number 82).

People are still reading about the flamboyant restauranteur Frank Baker (originally published Oct. 14, 2022), the Rum-Running Reifels (July 6, 2018) and the health troubles of Terry and Susan Jacks of the Poppy Family (Sept. 21, 2016).

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A March 3, 2017 Week In History on Pierre Trudeau marrying Margaret Sinclair in 1971 still attracts readers. Big international events also go evergreen, such as the April 24, 2020 column, “Adolf Hitler Commits Suicide, Benito Mussolini is Executed.”

The dictators died two days apart, and the news ran May 1, 1945. The Sun ran a photo of  Mussolini after he had been executed and strung up by his heels in Milan beside the story of the Fuehrer’s death, one of the most memorable front pages in the paper’s history.

Still, Hitler, Titanic and Robert Mitchum are pretty well known. Silent movie star Marie Prevost was once famous, but faded from public memory after her death on Jan. 25, 1937.

Then Kenneth Anger unearthed a grisly rumour in his 1959 book Hollywood Babylon that Marie’s corpse had been partly eaten by her pet dachshund. Her tragic story became a Jan. 27, 1917 Week In History, and seven years later, it got over 1,100 views online.

The moral is interesting stories tend to find an audience. This year a story about Caddy Cadborosaurus, Vancouver Island’s own sea monster, didn’t do big numbers when it was published Feb. 9. But it’s now over 1.8 million page views — a few people seem to read it every day.

You can’t keep a good sea monster down.

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