One of the ways to see how much attention a story is getting is to notice the number of times it comes across the feed reader. For example, in the last two days there has been eight stories, mostly duplicates, about Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz.

In contrast, this story about the withdraw of 4000 troops from Iraq has come across once.

The US military on Thursday announced the withdrawal of another 4,000 troops from Iraq next month as violence across the country hit a four-year low.

Of course it’s nothing but straight reporting. [/ sarc]

The military said it was pulling out troops deployed as part of a controversial “surge” of forces in February 2007.

It must be painful to report good news.

The US military said that last week had seen the lowest level of violence in four years across Iraq, but gave no casualty figures.

Figures maintained by the independent website www.icasualties.org show that the number of US fatalities so far this month was 19, the lowest average since the American invasion in March 2003.

I wonder how much coverage this will get throughout the day.