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You ranked them: 10 top stories in America in 2013

Here are 10 top stories Americans followed in 2013, ranked by respondents to a Monitor/TIPP poll according to the percentage who said they followed the story very closely.

3. 'Obamacare' website fizzles (50 percent)

Mike Segar/ Reuters/ File
A man looks over the Affordable Care Act signup page on the federal HealthCare.gov website on Oct. 2, 2013. The site had a disastrous launch on Oct. 1, marked by a series of crashes.

  • By CSM Staff

On Oct. 1, President Obama took to the Rose Garden to tout Day 1 of HealthCare.gov, where buying health insurance would be just like buying "a plane ticket on Kayak or a TV on Amazon." Instead, the launch of the federal "Obamacare" site was a train wreck like few seen in the annals of government mismanagement. Early enrollments were far below expectations.

Two months and a 24/7 emergency tech response later, the site was much better – but glitches remained, especially on the "back end" that produces forms for insurance companies.

Mr. Obama also stumbled over his oft-repeated promise that "if you like your plan, you can keep it." When proved wrong, he allowed insurers to extend old plans for a year, though not all state insurance commissioners went along.

Enrollments have picked up, especially on state-run marketplaces. But the ACA, the signature initiative of Obama's presidency, is still a work in progress. Uninsured Americans have until March 31 to enroll without penalty. Obama's legacy hangs in the balance.

– Linda Feldmann, Staff writer 

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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