There were 35,000 new news stories about the Pope in the 24 hours after his death, according to the Associated Press.

This is 10 times more than the re-election of George W. Bush.

The count includes stories at news Web sites as well as printed stories and transcripts of broadcasts found in electronic repositories such as LexisNexis. About 3,000 newspapers and 1,000 broadcasters around the world were tracked.

Clearly, it has been a good day to bury bad news. I wonder what we’ve missed today.

Update: Slate’s Eric Boehlert has some details:

From Friday morning, when word began to spread that the pope’s health was in serious decline, through midnight Sunday, the major American television outlets (both network and cable, as well as National Public Radio) mentioned “pope” 8,321 times, according to TVEyes, the digital media monitoring service. That’s roughly one papal mention every half-minute, for 72 straight hours straight. (Fox News led the pack with over 2,000 mentions of the pope since Friday.)

Sunday’s newspapers were also bursting with Pope John Paul II coverage, with dailies like the Atlanta Journal Constitution running five stories, while the Detroit Free Press published 11, and the Baltimore Sun, 14. The New York Times upped that tally a bit, opting for 16 articles and/or columns. That’s one more than the Los Angeles Times, which likely has bragging rights to the longest pope piece; an obit than ran 7,339 words, complete with 13 photographs. Other papers, like the Chicago Tribune and Newark Star-Ledger, went even further, running more than dozen papal pieces. But it appears the winner, according to a search of Nexis electronic database, was Long Island, N.Y.’s Newsday, which on Sunday published 41 separate pope pieces.