4.8 million page views ...

No YouTube clips this week for me -

San Francisco is abuzz with media ... after it came out Wednesday night that Mayor Gavin Newsom had had an affair with his campaign manager's wife. And after he held a pres conference admitting the whole thing.

The website for the SF Chronicle, SFgate.com, had its most traffic ever on Thursday, according to an article in Editor and Publisher. 4.8 million page views. It's a lot.

I'll admit - I read all of the articles. I lived in the Bay Area for four years, and Newsom is compelling. He is a charismatic force and even mundane stories about him held interest. But there's a couple of important things here - the paper broke the news online (push to the web! push to the web!) and people were reading it.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003541342

But Arianna Huffington asks in a post at the Huffington Post: "By What Definition is Gavin Newsom's Sex Life 'Breaking News'?" She referred to TV coverage of Newsom's press conference, which was labelled as such.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/by-what-definition-is-gav_b_40201.html

She censures the media for fixating on things like this and adds that politicians should keep their public life private.

Well, that's all well and good, but it is news if it draws record capacity to your website. It is breaking news to readers and viewers (the Chron also put up video clips from an SF TV station they partner with).

And with the current media culture, when Newsom gets covered if he goes out to dinner, this was big breaking news. I'm not saying that "Breaking News" should be splashed across the screen at every moment (as I'm sure it was), but the amount of coverage seemed warranted by Newsom's stature and previous exposure in the media, as well as by reader/viewer response.

LA