Financial content boosts WaPo’s new readership record

Executive editor Martin Baron, managing editor Kevin Merida and managing editor Emilio Garcia-Ruiz shared the following memo with The Washington Post’s newsroom staff:

We have been breaking a lot of digital readership records around here lately, but last month we cracked a special milestone in attracting more readers than ever. We reached 52.2 million total digital unique visitors as compiled by ComScore, surpassing the 50-million reader mark for the first time. These results, which are a 65 percent increase year over year, are a testament to the great work being done by all of you. The best part of the record is that every corner of the newsroom made a major contribution.

Leading the way was the Financial staff, especially Wonkblog, which had almost 15 million visits in March. The two most-read articles of the month on the site were by Roberto Ferdman from Wonkblog, on a better way to cook rice and on the popularity of Indian food. No. 3 was a working mothers piece by Jena McGregor of On Leadership. And No. 4 was a map-driven piece by Ana Swanson of Know More on the ultimate U.S. road trip. The Morning Mix delivered its usual massive audience, led by a piece on the Salvation Army’s new domestic violence ad. Local’s newest vertical, Inspired Life, attracted 1.2 million visitors to a piece by a Stanford neurosurgeon who was near death. On Parenting had a big hit with a piece on deciding when and if to call 911 on another parent. Phil Rucker and Paul Kane found a large audience for their piece on Hillary Clinton’s readiness for the presidential race. And readers were drawn in large numbers to the Magazine piece by Joanna Walters on how the justice system treated an 11-year-old after she reported that she had been raped. And the month ended with readers flocking to the fabulous Local coverage of the driver shooting at the NSA. The most read piece at the end of the month was bylined by Peter Hermann, Sari Horwitz and Ellen Nakashima and explained how a wrong turn led to the shooting. But many journalists dropped everything to help out.

It was another stellar month for The Fix, WorldViews, the Style Blog, Early Lead, PostEverything and Capital Weather Gang. Our Energy and Environment blog had two top 25 posts. And Rachel Feltman brought in the two most-watched videos of the month with one post about new 3-D printing techniques.

Much of our growth over the past year has been in the mobile web space. Almost all of that has been on smart phones. The efforts of Mark Smith and Tessa Muggeridge to train all of you on how to attract more mobile readers is clearly paying off. In fact, we trail the New York Times by fewer than 250,000 unique visitors in total mobile audience.