Colleagues: We’re back to setting records. We recorded 137 million page views for September – that’s an all-time high and an 84% increase year over year.

More than 22 million unique users came to the site in September, 2 million more than the all-time record set in August.

September was a big news month. You’ll see the most-viewed lists are dominated by politics (with a clear hunger for news about Sarah Palin), the economy and bailout coverage, and the Metrolink tragedy.

There were two blog launches toward the end of September – the sports team’s Fabulous Forum and Culture Monster from Lisa Fung and the arts crew. Both staff blogs are driven by contributions from multiple people on the desk, a great way to highlight our in-house expertise and a great model for blogging in general with many voices and hands to divvy up the work. Next up: a new multimedia blog from Colin Crawford and team.

Another highlight of the past month was the launch of yet another great database project – the California Schools Guide tracks test and demographic information for every K-12 school in the state. Latimes.com database guru Ben Welsh reports that database projects drew more than 1.6 million page views for the month – that includes the schools guide, the California War Dead database, the Metrolink database (check out this write-up from Poynter) and on the light side, the L.A.’s top dogs database. Coming next: restaurant inspections and crime.

No monthly Web update seems complete without a mention of Top of the Ticket. Andy and Don have raised the bar in a big way – they broke 3 million page views in late September (sending continuous e-mail updates along the way to that goal) and then went on to close the month at nearly 3.5 million page views. They are currently ranked 71st out of all blogs in the world on Technorati.


Most-viewed articles for September

1. Palin: wrong woman, wrong message (Gloria Steinem, Op-Ed)
2. Europeans on left and right ridicule U.S. money meltdown (Sebastian Rotella and Janet Stobart)
3. Sarah Palin’s style: the issue at hand (Booth Moore)
4. Alaskans angered that Palin is off-limits (Kim Murphy)
5. Palin talks to Couric – and if she’s lucky, few are listening (James Rainey)
6. John McCain tries to recover from comment on ‘strong’ economy (Michael Finnegan and Noam N. Levey)
7. Meg Ryan: ‘Happy and serene’ (Rachel Abramowitz)
8. With Palin revelations, McCain’s gamble is clearer (Peter Wallsten)
9. Metrolink 111 engineer led solitary life marred by tragedy (David Kelly and Sam Quinones)
10. Full recovery expected for Travis Barker and Adam Goldstein after plane crash (Ari B. Bloomekatz)


Top photo galleries

1. Metrolink crash recovery
2 . Sarah Palin: Politics of fashion
3. Celebrities by The Times
4. Sarah Palin: Style Notebook
5. Metrolink train collision
6. Celebrity mug shots
7. Burning Man 2008
8. Cindy McCain: The politics of fashion
9. Barack Obama through the years
10. Hurricane Ike hammers Texas


Top blogs

1. Top of the Ticket – 3,478,435 page views
2. Dish Rag – 2,173,667
3. L.A. Land – 763,266
4. Web Scout – 455,288
5. Show Tracker – 450,836
6. L.A. Now
7. Gold Derby
8. Booster Shots
9. Hero Complex
10. Technology
11. Daily Travel & Deal Blog
12. Countdown to Crawford
13. Money & Co.
14. Soundboard
15. Opinion L.A.
16. Homicide Report
17. Lakers
18. Up to Speed
19. Jacket Copy
20. All Things Trojan

Also of note is that this month, the top 32 blogs all had 100K page views or more! And among those was the Fabulous Forum with 131,461 PVs; it launched Sept. 24.

Across all the blogs we broke another traffic record – 13,952,264 PVs total.

Your Scene had 3,213,365 PVs.

Top videos

1. NBA All-Star LeBron James faces off with contestant winner David Kalb … – 170,853 LAT (video by Brent Foster)
2. Former Blink-182 drummer injured – 44,167 AP
3. Rescue and recovery at Metrolink – 26,117 LAT (video by Myung Chun)
4. Dramatic rescue from Chatsworth – KTLA
5. Paul Newman dead at 83 – AP
6. Bill Clinton to help Barack – AP
7. UCLA Coach Rick Neuheisel talks – LAT (video by Adam Rose)
8. Schwarzenegger speaks at Metrolink – KTLA
9. Sarah Palin’s unmarried daughter – AP
10. Kanye West arrested after scuffle – KTLA


That’s it for now. Send along questions, comments or ideas about great journalism and services that fuel even more record-breaking readership gains.

Meredith Artley
Executive Editor, LATimes.com