The WSJ and the success of the cargo shorts story

Max Willens of Digiday writes about the social media success of the front-page Wall Street Journal story earlier this week about men wearing cargo shorts, which results in a group of business journalists at the paper showing up Friday in the attire.

Willens writes, “But just how much hay was made here? The Journal didn’t respond to a request for data on how widely the story was read or shared, but we asked social analytics firm Crimson Hexagon for some data about all the conversations that took place surrounding the piece over the past five days. Here’s what they told us.

“To begin with, there is always some chatter about cargo shorts going on, especially in the summer. Crimson Hexagon data noted that during the first four days of last week, there were 5,790 posts on social media about cargo shorts. Over the past four days, that jumped to more than 22,000. (For comparison’s sake, The New York Times’ 2015 peas in guacamole controversy whipped up about 16,000 posts in a comparable period.)

“The lion’s share of that chatter took place on Twitter, with much smaller clusters of conversation happening on Tumblr and Facebook.”

Read more here.