Who’s Visiting the News Blog Update

The News Blog is now nearly three months old and we thought it appropriate to bring our readers up to date on who’s been visiting the site. We’re now up to some 10,500 “absolute unique visitors” and they have come from 98 countries or territories. (We had a sudden burst of visitors at the beginning of March and the number of our average daily visits soared from around 100 to nearly 500.)

The top international visitors hail from South Korea, followed by Japan, Vietnam and Taiwan --- a compelling bloc of visitors from Asia. Welcome! The next five countries, in order, are Russia, Canada, Iran, United Kingdom and Turkey --- three of these (Russia, Iran and Turkey) represent major audiences for VOA.

(For the record, the newest visitors come from Qatar, Sri Lanka, Chile and Sudan.)

While most visitors just come to the News Blog and read the latest, some have sought out or been directed to individual postings. Not surprisingly, given our Asian audience, the top posting has been the recent one on developments in Tibet. It has also been the one drawing the most comments.

Given the controversial nature of the topic, the next two individual postings with the most visitors have been the two on how journalists decide who to call a terrorist and who to call a rebel. Our posting looking at coverage of the speech on race relations by US Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama, was the fourth most sought out posting.

Interestingly, our colleagues at VOANews.com tell us that the individual story visited most on their site last week was a report on experts analyzing the impact of Senator Obama’s speech on race. It received over 22,000 visits!

The next most highly visited story was another stemming from the US Presidential campaign: one on Democratic contender, Senator Hillary Clinton, saying she misspoke when she described landing under sniper fire during a visit to Bosnia in 1996.

Third was a story on large demonstrations sympathetic to Tibet.