Readers take a liking to newspaper blogs

Lost Remote reports that statistics released today by Nielsen//NetRatings show "that blog pages within the top 10 online newspapers drew around 3.8 million unique visitors last month–more than triple December 2005’s 1.2 million."

What's most interesting however is that at those same top 10 newspapers, total online readership grew "by 9%, from 27.3 million in December 2005 to 29.9 million last month."

Other findings include that the number of people who read newspapers online and also read a paper's blogs grew from about 4% at the end of 2005 to about 12% at the conclusion of 2006. In addition, blogs tend to be read much more heavily by men, who made up 66% of total readers.