For those of us who keep score, a couple of new data points in the web "ratings" game.

Editor and Publisher, relying on its corporate sibling Nielsen Online, ranks startribune.com the 18th-biggest newspaper site in March, with 2.36 million unique visitors. That's a 34 percent jump from a year earlier. 

Side note for the print-must-die crowd: E&P notes that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which abandoned its paper incarnation March 17, saw uniques fall 23 percent from a year earlier. Its still-in-print competitor, the Seattle Times, racked up a 70 percent gain.

Meanwhile, local alt-weekly City Pages, labeled by some a lagging web property, responded its first monthly report on page views: up about 10 percent from a year earlier, to 2.53 million. That roughly doubles MinnPost.com's page views, by the way.

The rather breathy update from CP web editor Jen Boyles — who managed to get "whirlwind month" and "explosively growing" into her copy — says 40 percent of the growth is local, but the overall in-state/out-of-town mix is unclear. Boyles notes "news blogs" netted 385,000 views, led by the tale of a CNN anchor twice saying Northwest Airlines is "now serving penis."

Your humble scribe, who is shy about whipping out such terms in print, can only envy such numbers, as Braublog racked up 140,000 March page views. 

Boyles also reports that CP's food blog totalled 115,000 page views, and the music blog held steady at 180,000 page views. There's no specific data for T.D. Mischke's new webcasts, or CP's slideshows, designed as page-view honeypots.

Given that web design can inflate page views (think the Strib's annoyingly paginated stories), it would be good to have "unique visitors" numbers in April. (That's the number critics were comparing.) Still, CP deserves praise for responding to the web chatter with data. Hopefully, the cycle of information openness will explosively grow.