The most engaging journalist in the English-speaking world is a 29-year-old reporter who lives in London and works for CNN.com. Francesca Street’s stories attract millions of readers. More important, millions of readers keep reading her stories once they’ve started.

The “most engaging” label isn’t a subjective assessment; it doesn’t speak to her stories’ charm, though plenty of readers have been charmed. Chartbeat, a company that measures digital readership, keeps track of how much time readers spend on a particular story, and it recently surveyed 39 million stories published by roughly 10,000 websites to rank the “most engaging” reads of 2023.

No reporter appeared on the list more than twice as a sole author — except for Street, whose name showed up five times. Last year, two of her stories were ranked among the most engaging.

Street doesn’t write about the heavy stuff — wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the economy, the presidential campaign, or any of the topics that typically dominate homepages and front pages.

Instead, Street’s greatest hits are about true romance. More specifically, they’re about travelers who’ve fallen in love on the road, then lost and regained their paramour.

In an interview from London, Street said that since she started writing her “Chance Encounters” stories two years ago, she has looked for a variety of relationships to feature. She seeks stories involving people of different ages, backgrounds and sexualities. Often, the couples come to her, via a callout box on CNN’s website.

The “Chance Encounters” stories are typically topped by a two-sentence headline that begins with a pronoun and ends with a bit of a cliffhanger. Like so:

• ”She broke up with her boyfriend and moved in with a man she’d known for 3 weeks. Here’s what happened next” (This was the third most engaging story of 2023, according to Chartbeat.)

• ”They had a teenage summer romance. Here’s what happened when they reunited years later.” (It ranked No. 51.)

• ”They met while hiking and fell in love. Two months later she was diagnosed with cancer” (The 53rd most engaging story of the year, not to be confused with the 72nd-ranking story: “They fell in love backpacking through Europe then lost each other. Here’s how they ended up married for 24 years.”)

Street doesn’t feature celebrity relationships. “I think people see themselves in these stories,” she said. “They can relate to them.”

Another important element: All of Street’s stories have a happy ending. (Spoiler alert: The young woman diagnosed with cancer is in remission.) The couples may face difficulties or separation but, in the end, love triumphs. Street calls the stories “cinematic in scope but grounded in reality.”

Many readers discover Street’s work because it’s published by CNN.com, which is among the most-visited news sites in the world. Last month, it counted 116 million unique visitors, more than twice the traffic of The Washington Post’s site and triple that of the Wall Street Journal’s, according to ComScore. (The latter two sites are paywalled.)

But “engagement” is a different measure than mere visits or page views, says Jill Nicholson, who oversees Chartbeat’s annual list. Stories about big news events — shootings, election results, celebrity scandals, political drama, war and catastrophe — often generate enormous traffic, she says, but those readers frequently dart in for a few paragraphs before moving on, seconds later.

Which is why stories that engage readers for even a few minutes have become vital to the commercial ecosystem of media. Publishers covet “engagement” from readers because it might prompt them to subscribe. Sponsors like it because it means people are more likely to see the ads accompanying a story.

Street’s work tends to follow the rhythms of a Hallmark Christmas movie, with a clear beginning, middle and finale - from a couple’s first chance meeting and intoxicating attraction, to some kind of complication (separation, illness), to everything working out in the end.

One of her top stories this year — about a couple who met on a plane to London — is typical: Assigned the last seat on the plane, our heroine ends up sitting next to an attractive man, and they hit it off. Except he’s British and she’s American, with work and family commitments on two continents. Will it all work out? (Yes, of course it will.)

The popularity of Street’s work suggests that — for all the curves the internet era has thrown at journalism — some constants remain: Readers enjoy what were once known as “human-interest” stories, said Angèle Christin, an associate professor of communication at Stanford University.

Stories about romantic relationships, often the scandalous kind, were a staple of the penny press of the late 19th century, Christin said. The difference today is that Chartbeat and other digital tools can measure precisely how many people are clicking on the stories and how long they stick around to read it.

Despite Street’s prominence on the Chartbeat list, human-interest tales comprise only a small part of the most-engaging topics. The list also validates the public fascination with several familiar journalistic tropes and subjects: news about celebrities (especially their deaths), natural and man-made disasters, and crime.

The single most-engaging story of the year, according to Chartbeat, was the Los Angeles Times’ account of the death of “Friends” co-star Matthew Perry in late October. Five other news stories about Perry’s death also made the annual list, as did individual stories about the passing of Henry Kissinger, Rosalynn Carter, Sinéad O’Connor and Lisa Marie Presley.

The single most engaging topic, however, was the implosion of the Titan submarine in June: Nine stories about the sub — spanning such news sources as People magazine, CBS News, NPR and Fox News — ranked among Chartbeat’s most engaging.

Other news topics that appeared multiple times were those about mass shootings in Nashville, Monterey Park, Calif., and Lewiston, Maine; and natural disasters in Maui, California, South Carolina and Canada.