Local newspaper websites trend downward

Bill Sloat on newspaper websites:

Harvard University has studied news site traffic on the Web and the findings are grim for most of the nation’s big city newspapers, which appear to be attracting fewer visitors this year than last. They are losing audience share to blogs, aggregators, major national news sites such as the Wall Street Journal, Google and Yahoo. Local TV Websites also have rising trendlines. The report is by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. It is called Creative Destruction, and it is must read because it covers the entire spread of Web-based news sources.

Here’s that report.

I have no idea where the Dispatch might fit into this. As far as I can tell, they don’t publish their numbers. But I’d be surprised if they were any different from the national averages. Here’s more at Reflections of a Newsosaur:

“The overall traffic level…hides important differences within the newspaper sector,” says the study. While the leading newspapers have been gaining traffic, “the websites of most other newspapers — whether in large, medium-sized, or small cities —have lost audience and their sites on average have substantially fewer visitors now than a year ago.”

Traffic fell in most mid-size markets in the period from April, 2006, to April, 2007, according to the study. “The sites of small-city dailies also are not growing,” said Thomas E. Patterson, the author of the study. “Although two of the nine [small-city] sites we sampled had a traffic increase of 20% or more from the previous April, five sites suffered a decline, including one that lost 20% of its web audience.”

I’ve mentioned before how the Dispatch website is broken. I have the impression that the thing is held together by scotch tape- not even duct tape! They can’t even get their new podcast into a feed so people can subscribe with iTunes or some other aggregator.

This is not generic slam at the MSM. As I’ve also said before, no one else can do what the Dispatch does. But that site needs to be rethought from the ground up.