Katrina Drove Online Traffic in August to Local Media

Hundreds of thousands of people looking for the latest news on Hurricane Katrina went to New Orleans' local media last month to get the latest on the storm's devastation, a web metrics firm said Monday. Nola.com, the web home of the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper owned by Advance Publications, saw its traffic soar 277 percent from July to 1.7 million visitors in August, ComScore Networks said. Meanwhile, the city's CBS affiliate WWL-TV, owned by Belo Corp., experienced a 258 percent spike in traffic to its site, WWLTV.com, to 878,000. More than half of the traffic to Nola.com originated in parts of the country that were outside the storm's path.
[SOURCE: InternetWeek, AUTHOR: Antone Gonsalves ]