On Friday, golfer Tiger Woods held a TV appearance to talk about life after marital problems. At around 2:30 p.m., I screen capped some of the websites for some of the largest news organizations and aggregators. Today, I looked at the screen-caps, cropped them to the top 1600 pixels, and marked in green the areas of the pages devoted to Woods coverage (or related coverage, such as “Slideshow: Top 10 Adultery Confessions).

It was a slow news day. Any controversial government news is usually released in the late afternoon (This time, it was the Dept. of Justice’s decision to not punish Bush administration lawyers for their memos on “enhanced” interrogation). The other top American news that day were follow-ups on Joe Stack, the man who crashed his plane into the IRS, the Winter Olympics, and devlopments in the Afghanistan war. Still, it’s interesting to see what the non-Tiger-watching organizations put on their front pages. Click on the images below to see a larger version.

Even three hours after what was generally considered a highly-scripted 15 minutes of non-revelations (the Golf Writers Association of America boycotted it), Woods pretty much dominated the most visible spaces on general news websites. Of the major American news organizations, CNN probably had the most real estate devoted to Tiger; New York Times, the least. Both Drudge Report and Huffington Post had Woods as the lede. Asian publications (the few that I could read) gave little space.

Among social/computerized news aggregators, Google News gave Woods front placement…unsurprising considering its algorithm is driven by what news organizations have. Neither Reddit and Digg had any mention of it in their news sub-sections. This may be a little unfair, as these sites’ users may be me more strict in keeping all sports-related news strictly in their sports subsections. But I did check their frontpages (which are the top stories from all the major sections) and Tiger didn’t make an appearance. Also, for many of the other sites, Tiger stories were not always in the top 5 most read…then, or a day later. Maybe everyone watched it on TV and decided they didn’t need to read it online? Or maybe there’s an overestimation of the general interest in Tiger news that doesn’t involve new mistresses’ names or him retiring from the sport?