The people — or at least the people who make up Boston.com’s readership — have spoken. A lot of news happened in 2024, but these are the stories that readers cited as the ones that most intrigued them over the course of the last 12 months.

In total readers sent more than 500 responses to our survey, and below you’ll find a countdown of the five they mentioned most often, followed by six more that bubbled up just underneath. (And how much do you want to bet at least a few of these turn up on the list again next year?)

5. Massachusetts gets (part of) the eclipse (7%)

OK, so Boston wasn’t in the “path of totality.” We’ll get our own total solar eclipse on May 1, 2079 (turns out the waiting is the hardest part), but in the meantime Boston.com readers seemed plenty content with getting our own little slice of the natural phenomenon here last April. Silly glasses were de rigueur, schools and businesses stopped everything to check it out, and plenty of people actually headed north to New Hampshire and Vermont to see the thing in toto. (Although a lot of them seemed to run into a few problems getting back home.)

4. Pro-Palestinian protests on campus (11%)

Greater Boston has a lot of colleges, and a lot of students who aren’t particularly shy about speaking up at them. So it probably made sense that when students started protesting over the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, our schools would be a hotbed of such activity. And sure enough, MIT, Tufts, and Emerson led the way, followed by Harvard, Northeastern, UMass Amherst, Dartmouth, and UNH, among others. Even the Rhode Island School of Design got into the act, occupying part of an administrative building. Protests, encampments, arrests, and resignations seemed to arise basically every day last spring, and readers followed live updates with interest (and probably no small amount of trepidation).

3. Bill Belichick says bye-bye (13%)

One of two sports stories to make our top five, a sizable number of readers pointed to the departure of Bill Belichick from the Patriots team he had led to six Super Bowl championships. Even though it happened way back in early January, readers reported his leaving as having taken up big chunks of their sports headspace throughout 2024 — maybe because he kept making headlines, whether it was his opinions about the team he left behind, reports about his love life (couples Halloween costume, anyone?), or his eventual landing as coach at North Carolina.

2. Celtics are national champs (19%)

While they might not have had the juice of our omnipresent No. 1 story mentioned below, readers named our Boston Celtics the second most intriguing story of the year, with their decisive championship victory over the Dallas Mavericks in June dispelling any doubt that this was — arguably by far — the best team in the NBA. It almost makes you feel bad for all those other teams that didn’t have Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, a roster of stellar complementary players, and Coach Joe Mazzulla churning out quotes-of-the-day like an Internet-era Yogi Berra. Oh, and their parade was pretty good too. 

1. The Karen Read saga (28%)

In a year that saw the continuation of more than a few disturbing ongoing murder stories — the Brian Walshe and Lindsay Clancy cases come to mind — one captured people’s attention the most, by far. The trial of Karen Read made headlines and spurred water-cooler talk far beyond Boston, leading to the logical assumption among basically everybody that it would eventually be a Netflix documentary. Which of course it will be.

As you’ll probably recall, prosecutors allege that Read was driving drunk and deliberately backed her SUV into her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, while dropping him off at a house party in January of 2022. And Read’s lawyers allege that O’Keefe was actually beaten by people inside the house (and attacked by the family dog). It’s a case that has everything, including a Turtleboy. And since her first trial ended in a mistrial, we get to do it all again next April. 

Honorable mentions:

Trump makes headway in Mass: People of the MAGA persuasion probably shouldn’t get too excited — Massachusetts remained solidly blue in November’s presidential election, with Kamala Harris earning about 61% of the vote. But Donald Trump took the whole shebang, and readers (well, about half of them) pointed to his gains even in liberal Mass. as part and parcel of his booming comeback — he flipped 10 Massachusetts towns that had voted for Biden in 2020 and shrunk the gap in a lot of others. Meanwhile, the anti-Trump contigent immediately began hand-wringing over how his policies might affect things in the Bay State. 

The Mass. migrant crisis: Thanks to the state’s “right to shelter” law, migrants were everywhere — at Logan Airport, in repurposed community centers, at hotels and in a shuttered prison. And despite Gov. Maura Healey’s ever-tightening guidelines for shelter stays, the issue remains a thorn in her political side. 

Crime in Downtown Boston: A shoplifting surge and violence on the Common — which many blamed on problems that spread from the former encampments of homeless and addicted individuals at Mass. & Cass — meant much consternation among the city crowd. Mayor Michelle Wu, though, assures us Boston remains the safest big city in America.

Ballot questions: There were five of them! And three — approval of a legislative audit, the elimination of the MCAS as a graduation requirement, and allowing rideshare drivers to unionize — actually passed. Sorry, psychedelics and increased tipped minimum wage.

The arrest of Tania Fernandes Anderson: It just happened a few weeks ago, but Boston City Councilor Fernandes Anderson’s federal public corruption arrest — charges involved a $7,000 cash payment in a City Hall bathroom — immediately caused a stir on Boston’s political scene. (One reader even suggested that outgoing President Joe Biden should pardon her.)

State police troubles: As if the classless texts from State Trooper Michael Proctor revealed during the Read trial weren’t enough, the mysterious training death of recruit Enrique Delgado Garcia cast a further pall over the organization. Plus all the fraud. (Not that your run-of-the-mill municipal police departments got off easy either. Case in point: the Sara Birchmore case in Stoughton.)

Stay tuned for a full list of the most-read stories on Boston.com in 2024 next week.

Peter Chianca

General Assignment Editor

Peter Chianca, Boston.com’s general assignment editor since 2019, is a longtime news editor, columnist, and music writer in the Greater Boston area.