Plugin is available from TYPO3 extension repository (TER). After installation you can enable displaying of a read counter for each news item. Screenshots section show how it looks like.

To create a template for most popular news items, copy TEMPLATE_LIST section of your existing News plugin template and change ###TEMPLATE_LIST### to ###TEMPLATE_MOST_POPULAR### in the copied block. You can do further adjustments to template as necessary but the minimum requirement is to have  TEMPLATE_MOST_POPULAR block in the template file. News plugin is currently unable to reuse existing TEMPLATE_LIST block.