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According to a new report out this week from the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, traffic numbers on the Interweb look robust for newspapers–as long as you’re The New York Times.
The study crunched traffic stats for one hundred and sixty news sites over a year’s time, and found that while national papers like the Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today saw gains in Web traffic of an average of 10 percent, “the websites of most other newspapers–whether in large, medium-sized, or small cities–have lost audience. Their sites on average have substantially fewer visitors now than a year ago.”
Likewise, the Web sites of national television networks like CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and Fox all saw traffic increases in excess of 30 percent on average. At the same time, sites for local television and radio stations also gained audience, albeit at a slower pace. In a kind of companion piece to the study, Editor & Publisher reported yesterday that for the month of July, the New York Times‘s unique audience rose to over fourteen million from twelve million visitors, while USA TODAY‘s site logged ten million and The Washington Post got a little over nine million eyeballs.
Those are pretty hard numbers to beat, and it kind of puts the onus on those who say that the MSM is dying a slow death to try to spin this one to their advantage–although there’s more than enough red meat in the report for MSM-haters to sink their teeth into.
The study reported that the “biggest gains in audience occurred among the non-traditional news providers. The sites of search engines, service providers, aggregators, and bloggers grew faster on average than the sites of traditional news providers, whether print, broadcast, or cable.” Indeed, a 2006 Pew study found that 23 percent of respondents who said that they regularly get their news online listed Yahoo! as a news source. (But aggregators like Yahoo! and Google News still have to rely on the old MSM for content, so while lots of people might use them as their online news source, they’re still reading content provided by AP, Reuters, the Times, etc.)
And now for the blogs. The study looked at traffic for “eight prominent blogs” and found that while each averaged almost 200,000 monthly visits, the traffic level rose only 6 percent on average over the past year. But a list of the blogs the study looked at reveals something interesting: they’re almost exclusively liberal. The sample set included dailykos.com, firedoglake.com, wonkette.com, huffingtonpost.com, watchblog.com, crooksandliars.com, mydd.com, and littlegreenfootballs.com. Of those, five are pretty far to the left; one (watchblog) has different editors writing from different ideological standpoints; one (wonkette) is an equal opportunity offender, but is still essentially a product of the left, and only one (littlegreenfootballs) is from the right.
Tom Patterson, professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School who helped put the study together, told CJR that in putting the study together, the staff had much more trouble deciding which “non-traditional” media outlets to monitor than it did traditional media. “We were interested in looking not at the brand-new blogs,” he says, but instead “we tried to look and pull down some reasonably well-known blogs that have been around for a bit.”
But overall, the study isn’t so surprising. Newspapers–particularly big, national papers–have the brand recognition and the big-ticket talent that smaller papers, and blogs, just can’t match. One important thing to consider when looking at the robust numbers for the big papers is that they have been pouring resources into trying to beat blogs at their own game. The Times, the Post and USA Today have all rolled out their own blogs, which can’t hurt their traffic numbers, especially since a few–like the Times‘s The Lede and Freakonomics blogs, and the Post‘s Government Inc., Capital Briefing, and Early Warning–have become must-reads.
Another thing that probably led to the smaller growth percentage among the political blogs–especially the highly partisan ones the study looks at–as compared to big newspapers, is that the sample set has probably come pretty close to maxing out on its potential audience. There are only so many hardcore political junkies out there on either side who want to read what these outlets have to say. It’s by definition a niche audience, and as such its growth, if it happens at all, will probably be slower than that of a general-interest newspaper.
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