WebProNews

It's odd enough that reports about 2007 are still trickling in; there's a special touch of irony since this late-breaking stuff concerns the news industry.  Still, timing aside, it's nice to report that newspapers' websites received more views than ever before.

What initially seemed scary is that, in the fourth quarter of 2007, only 39% of all active Web users visited newspapers' sites.  Our response: just two out of five people followed the news online?  But after thinking about entities like the BBC, CNN, and good old WebProNews - none of which are connected to newspapers - we relaxed a little.

So back to the data.  Collected by the Newspaper Association of America and disclosed by Jack Loechner, it reveals that "the average monthly unique audience figures for newspaper websites grew by more than 3.6 million in 2007, a record year for the industry and an increase of more than 6% over 2006 numbers."

Also, "In the fourth quarter, users generated more than three billion page impressions on average, a 7.3% increase over the same period a year ago," so it's not like there were only significant bumps in January and February traffic.

The debate about print's death will continue, and for that matter, a debate over the whole economy's illness seems to be appropriate.  Still, here's more evidence that newspapers can survive in some form for a while yet.