The NY Times, WSJ, Washington Post, and most of the big boys are now committing to blogging.  The NY Times has just implemented WordPress MU, which is interesting, as it’s an open source product. 

Now word comes from MediaPost (and tons of other sources) that major metro papers websites have increased views on blog pages three fold.

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.

That’s a lot of eyeballs, and the interesting thing is that many of the bloggers aren’t the papers front line journalists, they’re freelancers, or even just fans.

The discussion in the industry on the subject of blogs often distills down to the difference between the wild west of Blogistan, and the rigid, fact checked, journalistic ethics straight jacket of the newspapers.  I still hear it argued that blogs have no place, but honestly, a three fold increase in traffic since *last month* will put that argument to bed forever.  In an industry that’s losing readers, we’re going to take our readers whereever we can find them. So what if the new readers are tuning into the “Boston Mommy Blog” (Meredith O’Brien on being a mother in the city) or the “The Pour” (the NY Times wine critic, Eric Asimov on all things wine).

David Churbuck’s got another source on the story here…