The pope, news services, snakes and movies in India. These were the most read stories our global correspondents filed in 2025. From our student authors, readers gravitated to stories about mental health and identity.
The past year marked News Decoder’s 10th anniversary. For a decade we’ve been publishing stories from professional correspondents around the world who help us explain complicated global events and connect what is happening in our own countries to what is happening elsewhere.
Alongside those stories, we’ve published articles about problems spotted and explored by high school and college students. They give us a sense of what young people care about and worry over. We see them exploring in different ways similar topics and in the process discovering how their concerns are mirrored in places halfway across the world.
We believe that stories connect people. And by finding and producing stories for people to read and hear, we try to turn confusion into clarity and show that for what seems to be intractable problems solutions exist.
Now that we are beginning a new year, let’s look back on the stories in 2025 that most resonated with our readers.
And here’s hoping that 2026 will be a year filled with good news across the globe.
—Happy new year, from News Decoder.