Next time a Seattle Times or Seattle Post-Intelligencer friend gives me a tale of woe about the future of their newsrooms, in light of either the seemingly declining fortunes of newspapers generally or of theirs in particular, I'm going to whip out this Editor & Publisher article about the February Nielsen//NetRatings ranking of the 30 most popular U.S. newspaper Web sites. The Times comes in 17th and the P-I is 19th. If you were to combine their Web sites' traffic, Seattle would rank fifth, ahead of The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe (Boston.com), and the Chicago Tribune, to name three of several heavyweights. Metro Puget Sound is the 14th-biggest media market in the country. In February, 1.8 million browsers visited the Times site at least once and viewed a combined 18.6 million Web pages. The P-I had 1.7 million unique visitors and 13.0 million page views. The only other Northwest paper of comparable size is Portland's Oregonian (OregonLive.com), which didn't make the top 30. (Sorry, don't know how the ranking goes after that.) The New York Times was first by a wide margin with almost 13 million site visitors and 455.5 million page views. That's a lot of banner ads. Stop the presses! Sell the trucks! Stop buying newsprint! That 19th century overhead is what's killing newspapers, not the Internet.
Woe is the future of newspapers – not
The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer are among the most-visited newspaper Web sites in the country.
The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer are among the most-visited newspaper Web sites in the country.
