New Media Meets Old: A Look at Redesigned Mainstream News Sites
Newspaper circulation has been on the decline over the past few years, but the traffic to newspaper websites continues to rise. Interestingly, the area of newspaper websites that has experienced the most growth is blogs …
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands ten months after Adrian Holovaty's influential argument that newspaper sites need fundamental structural change, not cosmetic fixes — and it reads as a progress report on whether the industry listened. The confirmed pattern it documents is stark: print circulation falling for years while newspaper website traffic rises, with blogs the single fastest-growing section of those sites.
First-order effects
- Newspaper publishers gain a working counterweight to their circulation decline: growing web audiences, concentrated in blog-style content rather than shovelware reprints of print stories.
Second-order effects
- Rising on-site traffic pushes newspapers into direct competition for attention and advertising with web-native outlets and aggregators, forcing further investment in site design and original web formats like the fast-growing blogs themselves.
Third-order effects
- If blogs keep outgrowing traditional story pages on newspaper sites, newsroom economics drift toward web-first publishing, weakening the print bundle that funds the newsroom — a structural tension between where readers go and where revenue sits.
The trend: Newspapers are migrating their audiences from declining print products to redesigned websites, with blog-format content leading the transfer.