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Blog Traffic Grows, and It’s Mostly Male
Over the last few years, as newspaper Web sites have started to maintain blogs, there have been plenty of setbacks. A Washington Post blog was shut down last January after commenters flooded it with vitriol, and the author of a Los Angeles Times blog was caught commenting on his own posts under a pseudonym.


But there is no sign that newspapers are turning back: just last Wednesday, The Washington Post announced that it would be adding three new blogs.

Numbers recently released by Nielsen/NetRatings, the Internet traffic measurement firm, suggest that such blogs are picking up readers. NetRatings said that traffic to newspaper blogs had more than tripled over the last year, reaching 3.8 million in December. (The total unique visitors to newspaper Web sites in December was 29.9 million.) Slightly more men than women read online newspapers, and that trend is more pronounced on newspaper blogs, 66 percent of whose readers are male.

“News and information is generally a male-skewing appetite,” said Carolyn Creekmore, senior director of media analytics for NetRatings, “and blogs are really getting a lot of the most engaged consumers.” ALEX MINDLIN

ALEX MINDLIN
www.nytimes.com

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