Today’s Online Publishing Update is here on the Digital Edge blog to make room for a special edition of the OPU that NAA e-mailed to Digital Media Federation members this morning. (Want to get the OPU in your inbox? Check it out here today and get it 3x/week by joining the Digital Media Federation! If you have questions about the OPU or about the Federation, please ask me at beth.lawton@naa.org.)

Newspaper Sites Attract 66.4 Million Unique Visitors in Second Quarter
Newspaper Web sites attracted nearly 66.4 million unique visitors on average (40.2 percent of all Internet users) in the second quarter of 2008, a 12.2 percent increase over the same period a year ago, according to a custom analysis provided by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America.

In addition, newspaper Web site visitors generated an average of just over three billion page views per month throughout the quarter, compared with nearly 2.7 billion during the same period last year, NAA reported.

Source: NAA

Twitter, Texting Worked in L.A. Earthquake When Phones Failed
Text messaging and sending messages via Twitter proved an effective communications tool during an emergency yesterday. “Twittering and texting may be the way to go in an emergency, given landline and cellular phone networks were heavily congested as callers jammed the lines, creating frustration for some users who had difficulty getting calls through,” CNet’s News.com reported.

The Los Angeles Times’ Web site was temporarily offline following the earthquake due to high demand.  (NAA’s PRESSTIME magazine last month featured a story about how to prevent your newspaper’s Web site from crashing under high demand.)

Sources: CNet, Editor & Publisher, NAA

EveryBlock Partners with Chicago Tribune
EveryBlock, a database-driven local news and information site, has partnered with the Chicago Tribune. A map on ChicagoTribune.com shows local news articles from the past 48 hours that have referenced certain areas of the city, EveryBlock announced.  The feature is at www.chicagotribune.com/block.  

Sources: EveryBlock, The Chicago Tribune

Game Over for Scrabulous; Official Scrabble Experiences ‘Technical Difficulties’
The tiles scattered for thousands of Scrabulous players this morning, as the Facebook application shut down after Hasbro, which holds the rights to the original Scrabble, filed a lawsuit.

Hasbro’s own Scrabble application, however, failed Tuesday afternoon under the high server load, CNet’s News.com reported.

Sources: CNet, The New York Times

AP, Newspapers Settle Suit Against Police News Publishing Co.
The Associated Press and several newspapers (including three Hearst Corp. newspapers in Texas) settled a lawsuit they filed this spring against the Police News Publishing Co. The Police News Publishing Co. Web sites had been posting newspaper content online alongside advertising, and later archiving that content. The lawsuit was over copyright violations.

With the settlement, the defendant will “only be able to copy the headline and up to the first two sentences of any stories from the newspapers. The Web sites can copy and publish only headlines and the first paragraph from AP stories provided to them by the news service. All stories used by the Web sites must be attributed to their original sources and include a copyright notice and link to the original work,” AP reported.

Source: AP via Editor & Publisher

Quote of the Day: Jarvis on Educating NPR’s Garfield about Comments
“I know you didn’t like my own observation of irony in your report. Fine, dismiss that as just another damned comment.  But note well, my friend, that all of these people are speaking to you with intelligence, experience, generosity, and civility. You know what’s missing? Two things: First, the sort of nasty comments your own piece decries. And second: You.  Bob, the best way to learn about the conversation online is to join in.”

 -- BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis in a blog post wrapping up the reactions to Bob Garfield’s NPR piece about the value (or not) of online comments.

Washingtonpost.com Partners with Predictify

Washingtonpost.com is letting readers predict the outcome of certain news stories through a partnerships with Predictify.com. The online poll program and washingtonpost.com have created a “Prediction Center” where site visitors can post their predictions and discuss them through comments. The most accurate predictions will appear on a leaderboard, TechCrunch reported. Try it out here.

Source: TechCrunch

Borrell: Yellow Pages Print Advertising to Decrease 39 Percent in Five Years

Borrell Associates is predicting that 39 percent of advertising spending on print yellow pages will “vanish” in the next five years. “After 12 years as an advertising medium, the Internet has finally reached small-business owners with viable marketing opportunities in the form of keyword advertising, interactive directories and low-priced online video commercials.  The recession appears to be triggering the shift,” according to Borrell Associates’ new report, “Say Goodbye to Yellow Pages.” The report also notes the substantial rise in online sales representatives across media categories and the growing importance of video advertising for local businesses.

Source: Borrell Associates

‘Flippers’ Head Online
Buying something of low quality, fixing it up and selling it for a profit was once reserved for the real estate market. Now, a number of entrepreneurs are seeking out poorly done Web sites, buying them, improving them, growing traffic and selling them for a (usually modest) profit, The New York Times reported.

Source: The New York Times

TV Show Viewing Online is Not Additive

Approximately 20 percent of television shows are now watched online, and 10 percent of that online viewing is replacing – not adding to – television viewing, according to a study from Integrated Media Measurement. More than 31 percent of those who watch television shows online are catching up on shows they missed earlier. “This suggests that the migration of consumption from one platform to another is only a matter of time for all of the online ’snackers’,” according to the study. (See Lost Remote for more details, or download the full report here.)

Sources: Lost Remote, Integrated Media Measurement

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