We are halfway into September and it's long overdue that we took a look at Daily Sabah's top 10 lists of August. Due to the lack of space the past two weeks, this breakdown had to be delayed. We list the categories according to their appearances in the weekly most read lists and this makes it a good indicator of the readers' preferences along with the past month's news cycle. At first glance, what August lacks in diversity, it makes up for in its changes. Without further ado, let's get right into it.
After a long absence from the top, we have "Business" in first place. Considering the past month's fluctuating currency along with efforts to combat it, the country's news cycle was dominated with business news and the category's 22 entries comes as no surprise.
Ten of those articles were in Business's "Economy" subcategory while "Finance" and "Defense" each had five news articles to their names. "Automotive" also made its first appearance in these top 10 lists with a single entry while the remaining news article did not belong to a subcategory.
Trailing behind in second place, "Politics" continues to maintain its strong presence as one of Daily Sabah's main focuses. The main subcategory of the month was "Diplomacy" with its 11 entries due to the increasing tensions between Turkey and the United States. "War on Terror" had two news articles while the remaining four were only listed under "Politics" because they did not fit any subcategory.
As the first two contenders managed to claim most of the spots of the month, "World" only has five entries despite coming in third place. Four of those were evenly distributed between subcategories of "Americas" and "Middle East." However, the remaining one belonged to "Europe."
Fourth place was shared between the "Turkey" and "Life" categories. Each of them had two news articles to their name. The entries of "Turkey" were not listed under any subcategory while the two news articles of "Life" were shared between the "Science" and "History" subcategories.
Fifth place was also shared last month. First we have "Columns" with its single article belonging to İbrahim Kalın. On the other hand, the second category was an "Editorial," which is fairly rare. That entry was on the pastor Andrew Brunson case and the increasing diplomatic tension between the U.S. and Turkey gathered enough reader attention to enter the lists.
August was not a surprising month when it comes to our readers' preferences as the two issues that dominated the news cycle – the economy and the diplomatic crisis. This also heavily skewed the dispersion of the entries on the top 10 lists. We will see what the September brings in a couple weeks in the next issue of these monthly reviews.