Correcting sloppy errors

I sometimes regret talking to reporters, but since I used to be one and remember how I felt when news contacts would not call me back, I always try to get back to reporters when they call. So I called back blogger Steve Friess. He used the interview to write a piece for the New York Times Web site and then used more of the interview to ramble on his blog. He made a slew of errors in his blog. I e-mailed him last night highlighting a couple of those errors. He promised to correct, but that was some 12 hours ago and nothing's happened on the most important error.

He attempts to compare the Las Vegas Sun Web site with the Review-Journal Web site. But, he failed to understand that the R-J's web traffic is housed in two places -- Reviewjournal.com and LVRJ.com. This is unduplicated traffic. To accurately compare R-J web traffic with anyone else, you must take the R-J traffic from both URLs where our content is housed and add them.

Steve uses Alexa.com to make his comparisons. So, if you want to do this for yourself, go to that site and type in the URL. Below is the correct comparison. As you can see, the R-J is exponentially bigger. On any given day, we're one of the larger news Web sites in the U.S. We're always No. 1 in Nevada by a wide margin. When locals and visitors use the internet to find out what's happening in Las Vegas, the Review-Journal is the primary source.

In Steve's blog, he suggests incorrectly (and using bad data as explained above) that the only reason the R-J is bigger is because we were here first and we just, well, lucked into it. That's a sloppy analysis bordering on intellectual dishonesty. The Review-Journal is "lucky" to be No. 1 the same way Tiger Woods is "lucky" to be the No. 1 golfer in the world.

(Click on this image for enlargement.)

Added by Al Gibes, 4/17/08, 12:30 p.m.:

Here is a graph from Hitwise, another independent source for tracking Web visits from U.S. users. The graph below shows traffic on the Reviewjournal.com, LasVegasSun.com, RGJ.com (Reno) and NevadaAppeal.com (Carson City) sites for the past 12 months.

Also, the reviewjournal.com site launched about 15 months after lasvegassun.com launched. They were first. We played catch-up for a while, and have been keeping an eye on them from our rear-view mirror ever since.