So, what do beleaguered County Clerk Wanda Halbert and a wallaby have in common? Well, one of them was found wandering around near Lick Creek in Overton Park last April after having escaped the flooded Memphis Kanga Zoo. The other was seldom to be found, as her office struggled mightily for months to get new Tennessee license plates to Memphis drivers. They have in common the fact that both of their stories were among the Top 10 viewed in 2022 on memphisflyer.com.
It’s an odd list, sort of representative of the year past, but also representative of just how easily some offbeat stories can go viral, well, just because. It can be a matter of lucky timing, or maybe a national website picks up a story, or maybe it just gets a lucky tweet from a celebrity.
Consider the human-interest story that Flyer Grizzlies writer Sharon Brown posted in May. She’d spent weeks trying to get an interview with star guard Ja Morant’s mother, Jamie Morant. When Brown finally got the go-ahead, she struck gold. Morant was forthcoming and frank and opened up about her own childhood and how she taught Ja to respect women. Here’s one exchange from the story:
Brown: Ja once said that you are his best friend and that you taught him to celebrate women every day, that he carries with him in his treatment of his sister, his daughter, and other women. Why was it important to you to teach that to him?
Jamie Morant: Treating everyone with respect is important, but as a man you should treat women with the utmost respect. I mean, you came from a woman, right? We see enough of the opposite in the world and I wanted more for my son.
Thanks to a few retweets from national writers and influencers, Brown’s insightful story became the Flyer’s most-read piece online in 2022.
Right behind that story was a clear example of how serendipity can shape readership — and not in a heart-warming way. Arguably, one of the darkest days in Memphis last year occurred in early September, when a young woman named Eliza Fletcher was kidnapped and murdered while on an early morning jog near the University of Memphis. A man named Cleotha Abston was soon charged with the crime, as we reported at the time. But strangely, it was not Abston’s first appearance in the Flyer, as googlers from all over soon discovered.
In a story from 2001, former Flyer reporter John Branston recounted the troubling tale of Memphis lawyer Kemper Durand. Here’s an excerpt:
“Durand was walking to his car around 2 a.m. on May 25, 2000, after attending a party on Beale Street when a lone gunman walked up behind him, took his wallet, and forced him into the trunk. The abductor, Cleotha Abston, drove around and picked up friends then, after about two hours, escorted Durand into a Mapco station to withdraw money from an ATM. A uniformed Memphis Housing Authority officer entered, Durand yelled that he had been kidnapped, and the kidnappers ran away.”
So, it turned out that 22 years before he kidnapped and killed Eliza Fletcher, Abston had kidnapped someone else. No one had publicly made this connection until we noticed Branston’s story getting a lot of web traffic later in September. Abston pled guilty in 2001 and served nearly 20 years before being released — with disastrous and tragic results.
Also scoring in the Top 10 was Toby Sells’ story about a controversial, Democrat-hating preacher from Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, named Greg Locke. Sample quote: “If you vote Democrat, I don’t even want you around this church,” Locke said in a sermon. “You can get out. You can get out, you demon. You can get out, you baby-butchering, election thief.” Yeah, so, he’s a lot like Jesus, and our readers gobbled it up.
Rounding out our top stories of 2022 were a couple that you might have expected to get a lot of traffic: a column (with pictures) that I wrote about exploring the Mississippi River bottom at its all-time low, and another photo feature in which Flyer film editor Chris McCoy posted a bunch of amazing shots of the same phenomenon. Sometimes the bottom can rise to the top, I guess.
