Everyone expected traffic at news sites to drop after Election Day. But in Minnesota — where the U.S. Senate recount has kept the election going and obsessives clicking — the Star Tribune saw its monthly "unique visitor" count fall 37 percent in December, according to Editor & Publisher.

Even though the Strib logged an impressive 2.2 million uniques, no site among the Top 30 newspaper sites declined as much in percentage terms. The data comes from Nielsen Online, owned by E&P's parent.

The tough month pushed startribune.com from 12th nationally in November to 19th among newspaper sites. The website's rank was lower than the Strib's print-circulation placement, which was 15th as of October.

The Top 30 list includes national papers such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and one upstart, Politico.com, which distributes a paper version in D.C. Web-only operations such as Huffington Post are not included. The Pioneer Press is too small to qualify.

Though this isn't good news for a bankrupt paper pinning its future on the web, this is only one month. It's certainly possible the recount's heated, early days pushed November traffic up so far that a falloff was inevitable, though that wouldn't explain the low Top 30 rank.

Also, "uniques" represent only one dimension of audience: the Strib regularly ranks in the top 10 in the amount of time visitors spend on-site. December data for that isn't out yet. There's also no measure of total pages viewed.