• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, January 17, 2007

Many of the largest online newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, have beefed up efforts to create blogs.

Consider, the Times alone now boasts Screens, a blog devoted to online video; Carpetbagger, about the Oscar awards; and The Lede, dedicated to further exploring major news stories, among other relatively new blogs.

It seems intuitive that readers are visiting such blogs; after all, why else would papers continue to support them?

Now, however, there's some objective support showing that online newspaper readers have taken to the publications' blogs. Data released this morning by media measurement company Nielsen//NetRatings shows 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.

By contrast, total online readership at the top 10 newspapers during that time has only grown by 9%, from 27.3 million in December 2005 to 29.9 million last month.

These numbers also mean that the proportion of online newspaper readers that also visit the paper's blog has grown from around 4% at the end of 2005 to around 12% last month.

Nielsen//NetRatings also reported that newspapers' blog readers tend to skew male--even more so than online newspapers in general. Men accounted for 66% of visitors to blogs, and 60% of visitors to online newspapers last month.