Reuters: 48 Million Americans Regularly Read Blogs (Well, That’s Not Exactly What It Said, But That’s the Real News)

Reuters really doesn’t think much of bloggers, which I suppose is a normal reaction to having your journalistic fraud unmasked and ridiculed. Still, that’s no excuse for this laugher of an article.

Here’s the nut of the whole thing. Only 22 percent of Americans say they read blogs “several times a month or more”. And to to reinforce the point that bloggers are simply reprehensible muckrakers, the editors made sure this paragraph was there, you know, just to explain what blogs are all about.

Unlike traditional, mainstream media, blogs often adopt a specific point of view. Critics complain they can contain unchecked facts, are poorly edited and use unreliable sources.

Critics say that, do they? Would any of those critics be former employees of Reuters who were fired after writing things that contained unchecked facts, were poorly-edited, and used unreliable sources, by any chance? I only ask because I’m sure there are a few of those folks whose numbers might still be in certain Reuters Rolodexes.

I’m wounded, really. So wounded that I feel compelled to retreat to my calculator to find out just how few Americans are really reading blogs. As it happens, 22 percent is a pretty big number. The poll only dealt with adults, so we have to do a bit of calculating. Checking here, I find that the number of Americans over the age of 20 in the US in 2007 is about 218,244,291. Twenty-two percent of that is 48,079,744.

48 million adult Americans read blogs regularly. Forty-eight MILLION.

By contrast, the World Association of Newspapers estimated that total US newspaper circulation in 2007 was 52.3 million with a five percent decrease over the past five years. Newspapers have had a pretty large head start and, as Reuters helpfully points out, has all those neat things like facts and editors and reliable sources and stuff. Layers and layers of them. And yet in just a few short years, bloggers are nipping at their heels.

I wonder how that could be? It seems an amusing mystery to Reuters. Perhaps they could get one of their investigative reporters on it. I hear that Shaggy’s not doing anything right now.

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Category: Blogs and Blogging, Oh, THAT liberal media.