• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, June 2, 2005

More than one in four visits to online newspapers' sites--around 26 percent--were made by viewers who had just been at other online news sites, according to a recent report by research firm Hitwise.

The report, which examined traffic to and from news sites for the four weeks ending May 21, also found that around 19 percent of visits to newspapers' online sites came from search engines and directories, while 9 percent came from entertainment-related pages.

Hitwise also reported that many visitors to newspapers' sites are from regions outside the geographic regions commonly associated with the print edition. This finding held true for papers known for publishing national and international news, as well as papers known for regional news.

Almost three out of four (72 percent) visitors to the New York Times' site site came from outside the tri-state New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area, while 69 percent of visitors to the Washington Post's site came from areas other than Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.

At the same time, 45 percent of visitors to the Philadelphia Inquirer's site came from outside Pennsylvania and New Jersey, while around 37 percent of visitors to the Houston Chronicle online came from states other than Texas.