Growth in Visitors to Newspaper Blogs

According to a story in the New York Times in January 2007, Nielsen/Netratings estimated the number of visitors to newspaper blogs had "skyrocketed", and in December 2006 was:

USAToday.com blogs: 1,239,000
The New York Times' blogs: 1,173,000
SFGate blogs: 515,000
Washingtonpost.com blogs: 433,000
Boston.com blogs: 388,000

These were early days for newpaper blogs, and if this is skyrocketing, it's on a planet with a thin atmophere. Compared with the visitor numbers these papers overall are racking up, these totals are small, although not insignificant. To compare them to daily traffic, here are some numbers from Editor and Publisher for February 2007:

New York Times: 12,960,000 uniques - 455,527,000 page views
USAToday.com: 9,050,000 uniques - 169,517,000 page views
Washington Post: 8,030,000 uniques - 154,836,000 page views
SFGate.com: 3,236,000 uniques - 51,617,000 page views
Boston.com: 3,197,000 uniques - 57,154,000 page views

Alexa (for whatever it's worth) says that in May 2007 only 2% of the Times' traffic went to its blogs. (Nielsen along with the estimates above suggested that blogs accounted for 13% of parent sites' total traffic.)

(There's a huge amount of additional information in the Editor and Publisher story mentioned above - check it out.)