Yahoo News Was Top Destination For Michael Jackson News

Yahoo News was the web’s number one choice last week for information about the death of entertainer Michael Jackson. In a post on the Hitwise blog, Heather Dougherty shows a chart detailing how the major online News & Media sites fared:

Late last week I wrote about how each of the major search engines handled the extraordinary search activity that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett on the same day. Yahoo is in a unique situation as an actual content provider with writers and editors, and some of those staffers were called in from home to help Yahoo cover the breaking news. The chart above suggests the effort was worth it.

But perhaps the big winner on the day was TMZ, the entertainment site that first broke the news of Jackson’s death. Hitwise says TMZ traffic hit a three-year high on Thursday, with 5x more visits than the day before.