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TMZ may have won the breaking news competition, but the Los Angeles Times is happy with the web traffic brought in by Michael Jackson's death. It's a new record for L.A. Times.com, says website executive editor Meredith Artley in an email to the staff this afternoon. Full email after the jump.
Mystery solved: One the looming questions of the Jackson coverage was what would the Times call the neighborhood where he lived. Angelenos (and the Times until this year) know it as Holmby Hills. But that's one of the long-standing L.A. communities excised from the map by the Times' mapping project, which is supposed to guide how the paper refers to areas of the city. The Times maps call lower Holmby Hills Westwood, and the part north of Sunset Boulevard they lump into Bel-Air. Early LAT web stories on Thursday said Jackson lived in Bel-Air. I'm happy to say that in today's printed paper the Times went with — ta da — Holmby Hills.
Artley's email:
Sent: Friday, June 26, 2009 4:17 PM
To: yyeditall
Subject: New daily readership record
Colleagues – our world-class coverage of Michael Jackson’s untimely death drew more than 12 million page views to the site yesterday. That beats our previous record of 10.2 million, set the day after the presidential election.
Not surprisingly, our homepage was at the top of the list. Next up was LA Now – our center of gravity as the news first broke, with 1.6 million page views, a new record for blogs.
Soon after the story broke, “LA Times” appeared as the most searched term on Twitter.
Our stories and posts dominated Google News for much of the day, presumably introducing some new readers to our site. And “la times” was among the top 10 terms of Google Trends.
All of this underlines that our quick, insightful coverage was on the minds and at the fingertips of more readers than ever before.
Meredith Artley
Executive Editor, LATimes.com