Last Thursday, as the clock ticked down to the Most Important Decision Ever In the History of Mankind, there was obviously a bit of interest in this fella named LeBron James. Rumors, innuendo, actual news, a smidgen of real reporting — the public's appetite of any snippet of information regarding the Traitor was insatiable.
The Plain Dealer, in addition to its usual slew of Cavs and LeBron information, had been compiling LeBron rumors and links as The Decision got closer. This proved beneficial for the PD and its online partner Cleveland.com raked readers in record numbers.
PD editor Susan Goldberg had the following to say about the record-setting day to the Poynter.org:
Where we have seen an amazing readership reaction is online. By nearly every measure, Thursday was the biggest day ever on cleveland.com, our affiliated web site.We had the highest one-day count of unique users, the highest one-day count for page views, more people in our live chat than ever before, more people looking at our live video stream than ever before and, in the last 90 days, the Cavs blog had more than four times as many people looking at it compared to the same 90-day period last year.
The PD hopes to set new records next basketball season with its wall-to-wall coverage of Sebastian Telfair. If that doesn't work, expect the paper to ask Dan Gilbert to write one open letter per day for an entire month.
