Nobody Goes There Anymore, It's Too Crowded

I love "Yogi-isms." And the one that I've swiped to title this post is typical of the appeal of Yogi Berra's unique brand of scratch-your-head honesty -- how could a place be crowded if nobody goes there?

Try this one: Newspapers are dying because nobody reads them anymore.

Conventional wisdom (and circulation figures) seem to back that up. So how come the New York Times saw OVER 40 million unique visitors to its website in December, 2008? Just who are these 40 million-plus people, if not readers of the New York Times?

There is no question that the newspaper business will have to change its business model to survive in the rapidly-changing world of media delivery. But these figures -- and the fact that the New York Times is among the most quoted news source on the Web today -- belie the demise of it, or many other "newspapers of record" around the country.