No funding from the state department anymore?

Even though I have yet to receive my secret decoder ring for signing up as a DeSmog Detective, I decided to sniff around the TCSDaily site and see if there were any interesting tidbits to be found. First I noticed that editor Nick Schulz claims a hundred thousand daily readers while the contemporaneous DCI press release claims hundreds of thousands. OK, maybe that's a minor quibble, but it caused me to wonder about Nick's other claim of an average of six articles daily. Although there are no prior main pages to do an article count directly (maybe because it makes double-checking the numbers too easy?), it is possible to do it by counting back through the individual issue categories and adding up the results. Here's what I got: 78 articles for the last 30 days, 60 articles for the 30 days before that, and 116 articles for the 30 days before that, totaling 254 for the 90 day period. This is a daily average of less than half what Nick claimed, but most interestingly it appears to show a substantial drop as of the 9/19 change in ownership. So sad. Could this be a trend in Wingnut Factoid-land?

desmog