
Sure, everybody thinks it's great when a story is read by many hundreds of thousands of folks. That's definitely a success.
But what about stories that don't get a lot of pageviews? Maybe the headline just didn't catch a reader's eye. Or maybe there was so much news that day that the story slipped through the cracks of the internet and tumbled into digital oblivion.
That doesn't mean these stories were not a success. Sometimes just one person will send an email about how a story touched them — and that makes a correspondent (and an editor) feel really good about their work.