By: Joe Strupp The State of Columbia, S.C., scored its highest Web traffic day ever on Wednesday after getting the first interview with Gov. Mark Sanford about his bizarre trip to Argentina. The paper then drew more site visits when it revealed e-mails between the governor and his mistress.
"For a single day, absolutely, this was the most," said Gary Ward, managing editor/online. "It was played up on [outside] media and with a lot of links."
The Web
site had 1.7 million page views for Wednesday, the highest since it launched in 1995. Ward said that was a 447% increase over the same day in 2008. He added that the site received 744,401 visits, a 1008% increase over the same day last year.
"We had the e-mails, too," said Ward. "That was an exclusive for us and everyone was linking to that." He credited The Drudge Report for drawing at least 400,000 hits to the site, while a New York Times Web site link added 19,000.
Despite the hits, the site held up, he adds: "We didn't see any real slowdown, anything significant. McClatchy has a pretty robust server and hardware that handled it."
Also on the increase were the number of comments posted by readers, which Ward estimated to be in the thousands -- with at east 150 complaints about vulgarity and profanity. He said that led to at least several dozen comments being removed, many more than usual.
"People were weighing in on both sides, and that brought an extraordinary number of comments," sais Ward. "On both the story itself, and our reporting the e-mails."
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