'Horse sex' -- Setting record straight

My first blog, almost exactly a month ago, was about last year's top story on The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's website. It was about a man who died after having sex with a horse. Don't ask. I don't know. I don't want to know. (My post ran Jan. 6, and it's in last month's archives if you want to read more about the story.) Tonight, when I was surfing the web to see how the Seahawks were doing in the Super Bowl, I came across an article in Editor & Publisher that sets the record straight. E&P is the trade paper for the newspaper business, and it carried stories on the Post-Intelligencer's coverage.

Turns out E&P's web traffic spiked on the horse sex story, too. It also turns out E&P checked into it, and found it was linked to the Drudge Report, a popular mix of links to news, unverified rumor and right-wing commentary authored by independent journalist Matt Drudge. Said E&P editor Greg Mitchell:

E&P also ran a Web story on the horse incident last summer, focusing, of course, on how the local press handled this seamy story, and it, too, proved to be massively popular. But as with the Seattle Times' No. 1 piece -- and unmentioned in [Post-Intelligencer writer Danny] Westneat's column -- the major reason for the traffic spike was a link on the outrageously popular Drudge Report Web site.

In other words, this was not our core audience -- and in the case of the Seattle paper, not their core audience either. In fact, it wasn't even "local" but national and international. After analyzing Web traffic, we discovered that the E&P story was also picked up on various fetish and humor sites, and this no doubt happened with the Times' story as well.

Commenting in the Dec. 30 issue of E&P, Mitchell managed to take the high road and the low road at the same time:

No doubt the stories gained a tremendous number of local eyeballs beyond Drudge. But editors need to analyze where traffic is coming from before jumping to conclusions on what a core audience really wants. Besides, how many horse sex death cases can you count on?

The moral of the story: Links drive blog traffic.

As if more proof were needed, look at this headline in Mark Morford's Jan. 25 column in SFGate.com, The San Francisco Chronicle's website: "Horse Sex Porn Candy Teens!
Inside! Fresh Google search terms to confound Dubya and the FBI. Also: Is Bush a fascist?" The headline says it all.