Jeff Jarvis reports that US newspapers have enjoyed a surge in traffic.

Quoting the Newspaper Association he says:

On average, over 56.9 million people visited newspaper sites each month in Q3 2006, up almost 24 percent since Q3 2005. . . . The group earlier this month reported unique visitors to newspaper sites rose 31 percent during the first half of 2006 over the same period in ‘05. Unique visitors to paper sites averaged more than 55.5 million per month during the first six months of ‘06, up almost a third from the 42.4 million during the first half of last year. Newspaper sites generated 2.7 billion pageviews in the third quarter, and visitors spent more than 41.5 minutes each month on the sites, according to the report. During that period last year, visitors viewed around 1.9 billion paper pages, spending 40.4 minutes on the sites on average monthly.

But, he says, this is not good news.

I think this further feeds the idea that newspapers are in “free fall,” as The Times said last week: The rush online is getting faster and faster and if media execs and ad execs don’t catch up, they will be left behind… sooner than they think.

I call out ad execs for a reason: They are holding back the progress in media.

Unless they get their act together, he argues, they will lose the market. There’s a lesson here for all of us, I suspect.

Robert Scoble makes an interesting point about quality audiences. He says, and I paraphrase, that one Digg user is worth many more Register users as they are more engaged with the product and do more as a consequence of what they read.

Jeff Jarvis weighs in on the debate raging about the downsizing of US newsrooms. He criticised Howard Kurtz (and “most of the newspaper industry”) for missing the point about downsizing. He quotes Roy Greenslade saying:

Without wishing to be unduly rude about US journalists, seen from the British perspective, it appears that there are far too many of them being far too unproductive. The LA Times has 980 journalists at present, a huge staff compared to any serious British national paper. Yet we manage to hold our government to account. Ask Tony Blair is he can get away with anything without being scrutinised.

Now, I’m fully aware of the different journalistic cultural differences between us and them. I’m certainly not urging that US newsrooms should be cut to the quick. But it appears to me that there’s been a lot of feather-bedding on big monopoly metro papers in the States and the current crisis is providing an opportunity to hack away the hacks who do not contribute. Kurtz concludes: “If this erosion continues, it would be bad news for serious journalism, and good news for corrupt politicians.” But Howard, please get this into proportion. There’s a revolution going on and we need to think positively about that.

That is surely the point.

MySun, the community play from The Sun newspaper, quietly launched this week. It allows readers to comment on stories, start their own discussions, launch their own blogs, set up profiles etc.

The Financial Times has launched a free daily blog aimed at the financial sector. Called Alphaville it says it offers “instant market insight”.

pmeme is a new site which aims to track mentions of people in the blogosphere. It’s a nice idea, and looks to be nicely executed.

eWeek reports that IBM is suing Amazon over the alleged infringements of 18-year-old patents relating to online shopping.

The patents that IBM says are being violated are U.S. 5,796,967: Presenting Applications in an Interactive Service; U.S. 5,442,771: Storing Data in an Interactive Network; U.S. 7,072,849: Presenting Advertising in an Interactive Service; U.S. 5,446,891: Adjusting Hypertext Links with Weighted User Goals and Activities; and U.S. 5,319,542: Ordering Items Using an Electronic Catalogue.

Of course, the point of patents is to ensure inventors get the benefits of their inventions but these all sound a bit vague and illustrate the dangers inherent in the patent system.

PaidContent.org has a piece analysing the detail of AOL’s move from subscriptions to advertising and setting out just how painful this move might be. It suggests, for example, that it should bring in $140m from advertising in the UK, but that this represents a third of UK subs revenues. The piece quotes Jonathan Milier, ceo,  saying: “One of the hardest things in business is to realize that your legacy business isn’t going to be a successful model going forward. … We were one of the first companies of the digital era to have to confront this.”

Google has launched its own version of customisable, vertical search, reports John Battelle. The service uses Google Co-op which the company admits has stalled a bit since launch, and differs from other offerings, like Rollyo, by allowing any number of domains to be searched, filtering for particular pages, and adjustment of the weighting of results.

Update: there is also a feature to allow “volunteers” to add sites to the vertical in question which could be great to getting a bunch of like-minded people to collaborate on building the ultimate vertical search for a sector.

I’ve been a long time fan of Newsgator – especially when used as a plug-in to Outlook, but I’ve been taking another look at Google Reader which relaunched recently. I’m impressed by a lot of the features, especially the way it is so easy to share blog posts on a public page – here’s mine. From now on I’m going to share more posts this way rather than blog about them.