The financial crisis earlier this week had at least one positive outcome: It was incredible for Web traffic to news sites. In fact, it's reasonable to assume that it was the biggest day in the history of current events-focused Internet destinations.

As Andy Plesser at Beet.TV points out (on video!), both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal had their biggest traffic days ever.

As the most visible papers in the city where the financial crisis was occurring, NYT and WSJ were perfectly positioned to see huge pageview numbers, but given that Web traffic to current events sites is continually growing, it stands to reason that Tuesday marked record highs for most news sites across the board.

Among the top 10 most trafficked pages — MSNBC Digital Network, Yahoo! News, CNN Digital Network, AOL News, NYTimes.com, Tribune Newspapers, Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division, Fox News Digital Network, ABCNEWS Digital Network, Google News — you could make an argument that MSNBC had higher traffic during the Olympics. There's no reason, however, to think that the other nine didn't set records on Tuesday.

(One can safely assume that Slate business spin-off The Big Money had its best day ever, but seeing as it just launched that's not really saying much.)