"Traffic to major US newspapers' blog sites grew 210% year-over-year in December, according to a report from Nielsen/NetRatings. Part of the reason for that tremendous rise is due to some papers adding new blogs during 2006... NYTimes.com was the top site followed by USAToday.com and Washingtonpost.com ," writes Roy Greenslade.

A Reuters blog post about the news throws in a couple spinach and Popeye graphics to indicate that blogs are to newspapers as spinach is to Popeye: " It may take time to digest, but new data from Nielsen//NetRatings suggests that blogs help keep newspapers healthy, or at least their Web sites." More discussion over at Techmeme (via Bloggers Blog).

Update: Andrew Grant-Adamson has looked for comparative figures for UK media blogs and suggests that perhaps The Guardian, and certainly BBC, have more blog readers than any US newspaper.