Traffic Data: Cable News, Led By CNN, Crushing Newspapers On The Web

Fox News may rule on cable, but on the web, CNN’s the leader–and its website is crushing the online efforts of the titans of print. According to ComScore, for the first three months of 2011, CNN averaged nearly 8.5 million unique U.S. visitors each day. The best-performing newspaper, The New York Times, was ranked third on the ComScore list with an average 5.6 million.

MSNBC was in second place behind CNN with 7.4 million unique U.S. visitors, and Fox News averaged 2.3 million.

Even trailing CNN and MSNBC, Fox’s online performance beat some of print’s biggest names, including sites for the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News and USA Today.

“This is a trend that’s been developing for the last three to four years now,” digital news analyst Ken Doctor of Outsell Inc. told NPR’s David Folkenflik. “This underscores the fact that when you run a news company, you’ve got to run a multi-media company.”

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