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In the extension of a long-developing trend, Nielsen and comScore credited The Huffington Post with more unique visitors than WashingtonPost.com in the month of September. In a great interview, Staci Kramer of paidContent.org shares the perspective of Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau on the topic:

Ever the diplomat, Hippeau said he could see my points but quickly added: “It wasn’t so much the Washington Post—by the way, it’s also the LA Times, it’s also the online edition of the Wall Street Journal. Of the big national newspapers, there’s only two our size that are still bigger than we are: USA Today, which is a very different audience, and the New York Times, which will always be a big brand and very well read and well respected. We’re not in a race with the newspapers. We’re not in a race with anything in particular. Our goal is to establish the brand that defines news and opinion on digital platforms.”

And the numbers are meaningful for HuffPo: comScore credited the site with 6,825,000 uniques in September, up 50 percent year over year, while Nielsen Media Metrix, which changed its methods and has seen some swings as a result, went with 9,474,000 uniques, up 26 percent. (WashingtonPost.com, by comparison, dropped 30 percent to 9.2 million, according to Nielsen.) Either way, it shows the site can grow in an election off year. The company says its internal Google Analytics also hit a record with 27 million uniques. But, citing competitive reasons, Hippeau wouldn’t release internal stats for time spent, number of return visits or registered users.

After raising a little more than $37 million, HuffPo also has the financial leeway to invest in growing the site, moving it beyond politics and current events to a host of verticals including style, fashion, green, books, technology, business, media. The newest is Impact, focused on philanthropy; a sports vertical is due by the end of the year. At the same time, the site has added local editions in Chicago, Denver and New York with Los Angeles due this year. Plans for next year haven’t been finalized. All of that has helped traffic improve in a non-election cycle, but the biggest boost for September may have come from a project that launched Aug. 17: Social News with Facebook Connect, fast-tracked by Hippeau who is a strong believer in the HuffPo as a social network.

Read more on the continued growth of The Huffington Post at paidContent.org.