DECEMBER 12, 2025 | FEATURES | By Sydney McGarr
Recently, I was out at a party, and met a stranger who said to me without hesitation, “Oh! You’re the Catalyst girl!” And readers, this is far from the first time this has happened.
They’re not wrong. I do love The Catalyst. For three years, it has offered me a space to practice journalism (which I love dearly), meet new people and constantly be challenged to improve. And explore some pretty crazy stories while I’m at it.
The fellow members of The Catalyst editorial, whom I love dearly, are similarly nerdy about this paper. We really do love it. If that wasn’t clear enough already, I spent my final week before moving abroad to Spain next semester (yay!) wrapping up every Catalyst statistic I could find so you can have this: The Catalyst Wrapped.
So Catalyst fans, statistic nerds and people who are just bored… Without further ado, here it is:
The Catalyst published a total of 404 stories this year.
The breakdown of stories by section was as follows:
News: 96
Features: 92
Opinion: 75
Sports: 73
Arts and Entertainment: 68
We were churning out stories in the Spring semester, with 220 of the 389 total stories published between January and May.
Who Contributed?
In the fall, 49 writers and 12 photographers/illustrators contributed to The Catalyst.
In the spring, that number was even bigger, with 55 total writers and 12 total photographers/illustrators. Nine contributors created Special Content in the spring, with eight contributing the following semester.
TGIF! Readers viewed The Catalyst website most frequently on Friday mornings around 9 a.m. (which makes sense, since this is print day!)
We published 303,900 words this year. But how many is that really?
- If you tried to say 303,900 words out loud at an average speaking pace, it would take over 24 hours.
- That’s about five novels’ worth of writing.
How big were the screens?
- 56% of viewers visited the website from their mobile phones
- 43% visited on a desktop computer
- The other 1% visited on a tablet (whose grandmother is this?)
Where in the world?!
Here’s the top 5 countries in order of Catalyst viewership this year:
- The United States
- The United Kingdom
- Canada
- Australia
- India
Runners-up on the list were Germany, the Netherlands and the Philippines.
And for the moment you’ve all been waiting for…..
Our top-viewed story was “Alumni, Current Players, and Parents Want Men’s Lacrosse Coach Gone,” written by Veronica Bianco ‘27 in September.
It’s been a year! Digging through these statistics to write this story reminded me of how big an operation this truly is, and how lucky we are to have readers who continue to care, seek out The Catalyst and share our stories.
So thank you, if you read all the way through this or all the way through anything else.
This was kind of fun… see you for another one in 2026?