Nielsen Numbers Back Froomkin: Suggest He Wasn't Only One at <i>Wash Post</i> to Lose Audience

Since the axing of Washington Post "White House Watch" blogger Dan Froomkin last month, the Post has claimed that most of the reason was the drop in page views for his column with Obama in office, not Bush. This line was emphasized again today in a New York Times report, which also warned that judging Web writers by page views was a slippery slope.

But Froomkin took issue with it today in an email to Atlantic blog star Andrew Sullivan, claiming the page view drop was real but not the main reason for his firing. He has alleged that others at the Post lost a lot of audience in recent months. So why was he singled out?

Indeed, the traffic seems to bear this out.

Here are the Nielsen numbers for washingtonpost.com since last September obtained by my magazine, Editor & Publisher (Nielsen is our parent). Back then, traffic really picked up at the Post (and a lot of other sites) during the election campaign -- and then has declined quite a bit since.

So Froomkin (since hired by Huff Post as Washington chief), indeed, did have a lot of company: Uniques off nearly 4 million since September. Traffic during one month this year actually was down 12% from one year previous. It was up 9% in May, so obviously some parts of the site are doing very well but surely a lot of other areas lost readers. Were his numbers compared to peak months? Like most papers, the Post refuses to release numbers on individual columns or blogs. It would be fascinating to see numbers for others.

Sept. 08: 12.9 million unique visitors, up 43% over previous year
Oct. 08: 12.3 million, 43%
Nov. 08: 11.1 million, 17%
Dec. 08: 11.4 million, 15%
Jan. 09: 11.1 million, 13%
Feb. 09: 9.2 million, (-12%)
March 09: 9.3 million, 5%
April 09: 10.2 million, 8%
May 09: 10.0 million, 9%

Greg Mitchell's latest book is "Why Obama Won." He is editor of Editor & Publisher.