In response to an e-mail from Truth Laid Bear ’s N.Z. Bear, the New York Times ran a correction earlier this week. Apparently, the Times had confused the number of unique visitors at Daily Kos with the number of visits. The correction read as follows:

An article on Oct. 28 about Internet sites that criticize mainstream news coverage of political campaigns referred imprecisely to the use of a liberal Web site, DailyKos, as tracked by another site, The Truth Laid Bear. DailyKos receives about 500,000 visits each day, a figure that may include multiple visits by some users. The site is not necessarily viewed by 500,000 visitors a day.

Today, New York Times reporter Tom Zeller writes, “as visitors to Ms. Dopp’s site approached 70,000 early this week…” By comparison, the most highly trafficked blog, Daily Kos, got “only” 86,000 unique visitors on Election Day, according to this article.

I could not find traffic statistics for Dopp’s site, but my guess is that Zeller repeated the Times’ earlier mistake, confusing visits with visitors. If so, the number of unique visitors to Dopp’s site earlier this week was far lower than 70,000.

The other possibility is that Zeller was talking about the number of unique visitors during a several-day period. (His language about the time period is imprecise.) However, I am not aware of any web statistics package could track something like that.

Time for another correction? The Times’ ombudsman’s office can be reached at public@nytimes.com.

For more on the visits vs. visitors distinction, click here.

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