Heather Hopkins of Hitwise posts about UK online news trends:
Yesterday’s announcement that the Financial Times has seen a 30% increase in online sales is good news for print media brands. I agree with the sentiments of PR blogger that online doesn’t kill print media brands, and our data backs that up. Print media websites were among the fastest growing categories last year, keeping pace with the News and Media parent category with visits up 28% year on year in January. However, challenging times lie ahead as more and more consumers turn to nimble social media websites for news and analysis as we’ll explore in the next post in this series on Competition 2.0.
While these data concern the UK market, trends are similar in the US. Online newspapers have seen traffic and revenue growth over the past year. But, as Hopkins says, “challenging times lie ahead.”
News readers, blogs and news aggegrators provide alternative sources of news and analysis to traditional papers and their online versions. But many users are interested something I’ll call “curated content.” Techmeme is an example of this: aggregated content selected from hundred of blogs and news sources (and those that elaborate or respond to them) but not the choas of a newsreader with innumerable feeds.
As I’ve said before, I think online newspapers need to mimic what Techmeme is doing, in addition to generating their own original content. There’s little or no additional cost here to the paper and lots of value-add for the user.
Screenwerk 
March 1, 2007 at 8:16 pm
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March 1, 2007 at 8:20 pm
How would they mimic TechMeMe… doesn’t seem to me like it’d be the easiest thing to accomplish. Unless TechMeMe is for sale? Or someone will make an open source version? Would be cheap to start developing something like that from scratch – not likely to be affordable unless you’re the New York Times.
March 1, 2007 at 8:45 pm
I’m not a technologist/engineer, but I think the approach can be duplicated if not the platform. There are probably developers internally that could create something like this without too much trouble — but I could be wrong I suppose.