It’s an unfortunate truism that bad news in the real world is often good news for news publishers. Tragedy attracts eyeballs, and that’s even more true when the tragedy doesn’t have a clear ending. On December 13, a 48-year-old man opened fire on a group of Brown University students studying for finals, killing two and wounding nine others. A mass shooting on an Ivy League campus was always going to draw attention, but the scale multiplied when it became clear that the shooter had somehow gotten away. By the time the shooter was found dead by suicide five days later, he’d killed another man in Massachusetts.
The national attention pushed a lot of people to the website of The Providence Journal, Rhode Island’s major daily newspaper, which covered the story closely. And that extra traffic meant that it saw the largest jump in web traffic of any U.S. local newspaper in December 2025, according to data from Similarweb.
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