From independent publisher Crikey.com.au, comes this leaked e-mail - although to be honest if you worked there, you'd probably want it leaked anyway. An apparently 'leaked' memo would get more attention than say a press release clarifying the original findings...

"Ninemsn CEO tells staff: we're still number one. Message from ninemsn CEO Tony Faure to all staff yesterday:"

All, You may have seen some media coverage of recent Nielsen numbers on the online news category. Some media have taken these numbers and used them in a naive comparison of apples and oranges. Claims that SMH has overtaken ninemsn as the leading online news source are wrong. While we don't dispute the data reported by Nielsen, the ninemsn news referred to in the Nielsen number is just that - only the ninemsn news URL. Nielsen's figure for ninemsn does not take into account the UBs for the news within other sections of ninemsn such as the homepage, sport, weather and entertainment. It also doesn't take into account the huge homepage news UBs, which are difficult to break out, but clearly very large. By contrast, the SMH news number quoted by Nielsen is almost their entire site including news, sport, weather, business, entertainment, Travel, technology and Life & Style. Our news publisher number - which takes into account news, weather, sport (still not everything that SMH includes) - would be higher. In this far more accurate and like-for-like comparison, ninemsn currently has higher daily and monthly UBs than SMH. Max and his team have been kicking some great goals with recent live news streams, getting the cadets up and running and as we all saw at the company meeting, our foreign correspondent Henri. We know we have the leading online news whatever numbers you look at, and we will be correcting this to the media in the coming days."