Butts were big, but oh, Jonas!

The other day, Mark Schultz, our Orange County editor, was driving on Franklin Street when the driver in front of him rolled down her window and tossed out a cigarette.

Schultz was bothered by this. So Tuesday, he wrote about it in the blog that his staff keeps up, called OrangeChat. Here is what he wrote:

"Guess the driver of the Lexus RX300 in front of me the other morning didn't have an ashtray. Why else would she roll down her window and drop her cigarette butt on East Franklin Street in front of the Chapel Hill Museum?" Then he added in parentheses a comment about the price of an RX class Lexus being about $40,000.

OK, so maybe the reference to the price of a Lexus was a little class warfare-ish, but Mark was just being a citizen offended by littering. The response was swift. His three-paragraph post got around 1,200 reads and 13 comments by Friday morning. Most comments were from like-minded people offended by the littering. Others told Mark to get a life.

Mark was a little surprised by the number of people who read his little blog post, and he suggested to us that maybe there's a story here about litter, but he couldn't figure out what it was.

I replied, yeah, but in the meantime, while you figure it out, why don't you put up another post and talk about the response. Which he did. And that got nearly 600 reads and seven more comments.

I'm still formulating my Grand Unifying Theory about what kind of things people are drawn to online. But it's not always the stories that take us the longest to develop. Good investigative journalism does have a big online audience. You can see it in the traffic numbers. But so do short items that hit some sweet spot where there is a big appetite.

Now, 1,200 page views is not a tremendous number. But it's a lot of readers for three paragraphs.

Let me give another example. A couple of our photojournalists, Michael McLoone of the The Cary News and Ethan Hyman of The N&O, took pictures of the Jonas Brothers golfing and at their concert. If you don't know about the Jonas Brothers, no matter. We put up a photo gallery with 38 pictures. It has gotten more than 106,000 hits. And counting. That's because teenage girls are passionate about the Jonas Brothers in a way that they are not passionate about the American Dance Festival -- no offense to the ADF.

The point is that we still want to cover the ADF, but we also have to be aware of and respect the audience of the Jonas Brothers. God bless their Jonas-loving mouse clicks.

Now Schultz has a somewhat smaller audience for OrangeChat, but it is a growing one. (You can see it at blogs.newsobserver.com/orangechat/home.) July was a very good month, with nearly 13,000 page views. I personally like the blog because it provides a window into the rather intense politics of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, where everything is fodder for an argument, a cigarette tossed out the window or anything that any developer wants to build, anywhere.

I'm still wondering whether the owner of the Lexus knows about the hoo-hah she unleashed.

Top online stories

Here are the five most-read stories on newsobserver.com from the past week:

* "Facing questions, Edwards evades reporters."

* "Seven detained after mall brawl."

* "No dad listed for child; John Edwards aide claims paternity."

* "Edwards ending college program."

* "Immigration arrest raises concerns."