Traffic To theRoot.com Soars After Skip Gates’ Arrest

theRoot.com showed impressive editorial and marketing savvy with its coverage of the arrest Monday of Harvard University professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. No surprise there. Gates, one of America’s preeminent scholars, started theRoot.com with Donald E. Graham, chief executive of the Washington Post Co. The affiliation with Gates helped theRoot offer some of the best coverage of the incident, which drew national headlines.

The result was a huge spike in traffic for the site, which attracted more than 1 million unique visitors in June and figures to see that number grow. By mid-afternoon Tuesday, “the root” had become the 16th most searched phrase on Google, one of the best performances ever for an African-American oriented site.

Gates, the director of Harvard’s W.E.B Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, was arrested Monday after returning to his home in Cambridge, Mass., from an overseas trip. A woman had called police after reporting seeing “two black males with backpacks on the porch” of a two-story home near the Harvard campus. It turned out that the two men were Gates and his driver, and Gates was merely trying to enter his home through a jammed front door. Police arrived and Gates was later charged with disorderly conduct after police claimed Gates confronted them.

The story quickly spread across the Internet, with supporters of Gates calling his arrest blatant racial profiling. The charges were soon dropped — but theRoot.com stayed all over the story with analysis, commentary and pictures. By mid-afternoon Tuesday, nearly 400 story comments had been placed by visitors to the site, and theRoot’s coverage was linked on social networking sites all across the Internet.

A big part of theRoot’s package was a statement from Gates’ attorney discussing the incident, and that piece likely led to the big spike in traffic. The site’s coverage was both superb and fair, as it took advantage of rare access and parlayed it into one of the biggest viral stories on the ‘net.