The Decline of Local News on the Net? - Brad Stone, Bits

A week after Google made headlines by opening up Google News to commentary, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University is weighing in with an interesting study: Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet. The center looked at traffic to 160 news Web sites over the last year and found overall traffic leveling off. But there were some telling distinctions. Newspapers with national brands, like the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today, saw their audiences grow, on average, 10 percent over the year. Most other newspapers lost visitors.

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