Credit: Mike Eliason / S.B. County Fire Dept.

We can’t underestimate the value the eye has in telling a story. You know the saying: A picture is worth a thousand words. What if we told you our top five Instagram posts of 2021 are worth 13,750? That’s right, we just added up the word counts from all of the corresponding stories. Because that is the domain of web content managers, babey! 

As far as counting likes go, however, let’s be fair: We are a local paper, so we weren’t doing numbers … but we did enough to be able to crunch ‘em! It helps to give us a literal snapshot of what stories resonated with our readers this year — and we’ve been able to zoom in on a few developments. 

We’ll let you in on one: It’s noticeable that a sizable chunk of our best-performing posts were climate stories. It makes sense for denizens of Earth Day’s birthplace to care about the state of our planet, especially as global warming contributes to the issue of wildfires in our area. (Also, the sublimity of weather phenomena just makes for ideal photo-ops.)

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