Newspapers Need Blogs Like Popeye Needs Spinach

Posted on January 18, 2007

Nielsen/NetRatings study has found that the traffic to newspaper blogs at the top 10 online newspapers soared 210 percent from December 2005 to December 2006. The growth means it is likely that newspapers will get more and more bloggish in 2007. Jeff Jarvis says, "I'll bet this helps take the cooties off the word 'blog' in newsrooms."

A Reuters blog post about the news throws in a couple spinach and Popeye graphics to indicate that blogs are to newspapers as spinach is to Popeye. In other words, blogs are a big strength booster for newspaper websites.

On a less interesting note the survey also indicated that blog readers tend to be male and for some reason newspaper blog readers skew even more towards males. The study found that blog readers are 60 percent men and 40 percent women and among newspaper blog pages, this skew intensified, with 66 percent men and 34 percent women. The Nielsen//NetRatings press release is located here. More discussion of this story can be found at Techmeme.