Jennifer Saba of Editor & Publisher reports that new numbers from Nielsen Online show The Huffington Post passing Washingtonpost.com in unique users in September.

Granted, HuffPost is a long way from challenging Yahoo! News for leadership among current events and global news web properties. Yahoo's news site had 42.6 million unique visitors in September, while HuffPost was at No. 15 with 9.4 million uniques. Still, the liberal blog -- which mixes progressive opinion pieces with aggregated news, videos and plenty of celebrity photos and coverage -- draws more traffic than a number of "old media" web properties, including Hearst Newspapers Digital, the BBC and Cox Newspapers.

Saba writes that Nielsen urges caution regarding year-over-year comparisons because the measurement company in June made its audience panel eight times larger. Fine, but the current data is the current data, and HuffPost is positioned to pass USATODAY.com (9.9 million uniques in September), McClatchy Newspaper Network (10.5 million) and CBS News Digital Network (10.6 million) if the 26 percent year-over-year growth cited by Nielsen is anywhere near accurate.

The other interesting thing I noticed from Saba's article is that Yahoo! News had nearly three times as many unique visitors in September as Google News, which was in ninth place with 14.6 million. Here's at least one area where Yahoo has the upper hand over the search giant.