'Chicago Tribune' Blago Coverage Scores Record Web Traffic

By: Joe Strupp More readers visited the Chicago Tribune's Web site on Tuesday than at any time in its 13-year history, according to Digital Editor Bill Adee, who said the online coverage amounted to an "ass-whipping" of the rival Chicago Sun-Times.

"Our investigative crew gave an ass-whipping that we have not seen," said Adee, claiming his paper broke the story at 8 a.m. "We had it alone for at least 35 to 40 minutes. That is pretty good."

The Tribune Web site had more unique visitors than ever on Tuesday, 1.6 million, sparked by the morning arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, according to Adee. He said that surpassed the previous record on Nov. 5, the day after Barack Obama's election, when 1.3 million unique visitors were recorded.

John Cary, senior director/interactive, at the Sun-Times, said he believes his paper had the story up "eight-ish," but did not claim to have broken it.

"The Tribune had an inkling that it was coming," he admits, noting they had been asked to hold off reporting on the federal investigation in the recent past. "But if they had known about it, they would have been at his house."

Cary said his Web site also had a large traffic boost, noting 642,000 unique visitors and 2.1 million page views. "We had great traffic, it was not record numbers," he said. "This was higher than usual, pleasingly high."

As for Adee's claiming of "ass-whipping," Cary's only retort: "Bill, Bill, Bill."

Adee said more Chicago visitors logged on, 192,000, and more from Illinois, 450,000, than ever before. "When the governor gets arrested and our news organization is the one reporting it, others credit our news organization," Adee said. "The first couple of hours were our best hours."

Adee noted that the site had more page views when Obama was elected, with 15 million recorded, compared to 7.95 million page views on Tuesday. He said that was likely due to more images being reviewed by visitors on the post-Election Day coverage.

"There was a lot of photo traffic that day, and our governor is not as photogenic as Obama," he added.

Unique visitors record the number of separate log-ons during the day.