WebProNews

The holiday season is supposed to be a happy time of year, and it would be a shame to discuss the death of print during it. So we’ll talk about print’s life, instead; new numbers from Compete indicate that it could be a long one yet.

Admittedly, Compete measures site traffic, not newspaper subscriptions, but the data is encouraging. Unique visitors to NYTimes.com were up 3.9 percent on a month-to-month basis, according to Alex Patriquin, and the average visit’s length also increased.

What’s more, he writes in reference to the Wall Street Journal, "The financial news icon actually doubled US-based unique visitors from 1.5M in June to 3M in November, despite residing behind a paid subscription wall."

Neither USA Today nor the Washington Post fared quite as well, but their numbers remain relatively strong. Consider what might happen at the beginning of 2008 - what better time to become a well-informed person with a newspaper subscription? - and things could become better still.

In any event, all four newspapers mentioned here seem more than capable of weathering the winter. Then, come spring, we’ll see if the warm weather does them any good.