Monday afternoon, Natchez Democrat reporter Adam Koob and I were traveling Duck Pond Road in east Adams County looking for potholes.

It wasn’t an interesting beginning to the week until suddenly I instinctively said, “Stop.”

Adam hit the brakes and the car screeched to a halt. Looking out my window I saw a rainbow arching across the sky. At almost the same moment a brief coating of sleet hit the car window.

Rainbows rarely happen in the Miss-Lou. But rarer still was sleet on the first day of December.

Across town, workers at The Natchez Democrat were having a similar experience. When the sleet storm passed through town, work stopped at the office as everyone leapt from their chairs to see the freak weather event.

Lately I have taken an interest in tracking what stories are popular on the natchezdemocrat.com Web site.

I wouldn’t call it an obsession just yet. But each morning I like to look at the charts that track which stories our readers find the most interesting online.

I look to see if there is some common thread that runs through the stories that are popular online.

Articles about murder, crime and tragic accidents have always been the most popular — online and in print.

In the first weeks of our new Web site, the news of the teenagers killed in an accident on Briel Avenue flooded our online site with readers and comments.

In recent months, morning reports of a school bus accident in Concordia Parish also attracted a large audience.

“If it bleeds it leads” is a common cliché in the news industry. Readership numbers of such stories seem to give the phrase some validity.

But that doesn’t explain why in the past few weeks stories of a big cat roaming the area or a freak sleet storm on the first day of December also gained similar-size audiences.

Ever since the cougar’s mysterious appearance, cougar stories have consistently outperformed most other stories online.

Monday’s sleet story was the highest-ranked story this week.

What is it that attracts the attention of readers? What is the common thread?

It’s a question that has fascinated news organizations, probably since the beginning of the printing press or maybe before.

Before the Internet, news organizations devised fancy techniques to track how readers perused the newspaper. Called eye tracking, contraptions mounted on a reader’s head would chart the spots at which a user’s eyes looked. This was done by measuring corneal reflection. Such scanners created tangled road maps as the eye darted from one corner of the page to another.

Analysts would then take these tangled diagrams and report, “Aha! This is what readers like,” in some fancy report.

Monday’s events convince me that one doesn’t need fancy contraptions to determine what is the news.

It is the human interest in the unusual, the unknown and in uncommon things that attracts readers. It is those things that make us curious enough to say, “Stop,” in the middle of a country road or to leap from our desks in excitement.

That is the common thread in the stories that attract reader attention.

I am convinced that users read such stories because they are trying to learn more about what they don’t know — how things happen and why.

Reading salacious stories of crime and tragedy holds up a mirror that shows us what we fear we are capable of as human beings.

Reading stories about the awesome power of God and nature provide us with the hope that we too are a part of that creation.

Maybe it is that through reading, we gain a better understanding of who we are and the world around us.

Ben Hillyer is the Web editor of The Natchez Democrat. He can be reached at 601-445-3540.