Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz has a well-earned reputation for being atypically blunt as a corporate leader.  Yesterday, she spoke at a UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York, where she addressed the topic of recent site traffic surges and how that will help her company reach their quarterly revenue targets.

“God bless Tiger.  This week we got a huge uplift…Better than Michael Jackson dying.  Kind of hard to put an ad up next to a funeral.”

Now she said this because apparently, the golfer’s had some sort of trouble at home…

Better still for Yahoo! the Tiger stories around these revelations extend far beyond the sports page to include front page news, media and gossip.  When it comes to analyzing embarrassing, salacious details of one of the world’s highest profile celebrities, we can’t get enough.  And so we all watch the legacy of the world’s greatest golfer crumble down to the level of say, Jon Gosselin.

The news business has long leveraged our appetite for mucking about in humanity’s seamier topics while keeping our own hands clean.  Fox News’ famous “If it bleeds, it leads” philosophy behind it’s early nightly newscasts still sounds horrifyingly sordid some twenty years later.

We may be in the world of new media, but the song remains the same.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79