Since Ebert went on leave for surgery in June, rogerebert.com's traffic has dove 65%. Over the same period, the Sun Times' website has lost 25% and Chicago Business doesn't expect the redesigned website launched last week to significantly help matters.  

But this story is nothing new to Internet journalism, that is if you consider blogging to be journalism.

At the end of August, The Wall Street Journal published an article documenting the traffic fallout when a blogger-personality goes on vacation. When political blogger for the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan, took a two-week holiday, the site's traffic plummetted over 30,000 readers. Another well known blogger, Michelle Malkin, saw traffic at her site fall by 80,000 when she went on vacation despite her hiring of guest bloggers to fill her shoes.

Such great traffic losses at newspaper sites and blogs highlight an aspect of new media that may or may not be attractive for journalists: they may like the fact that the "personality becomes the publication," meaning the online column is their voice and their readers visit explicitly for reading their material, but they may get worn down from the constant posting which needs to be done for two reasons:

1. Fans: Internet readers are fickle. If they get used to reading you and then all of sudden you disappear, there are plenty of other equally entertaining blogs and columns online that they will migrate to, soon forgetting about the enjoyment you used to give...
2. Income: ...and once the fans are gone, don't expect advertising revenue to get any higher. If you're paying the bills with Google Ads, you'd better keep posting.

This is also one reason among many why it is difficult for newspaper reporters to keep a quality blog and why their bosses need to ease off on the pressure for them to do all of that extra work, most times for little to no extra compensation.

Anyways, what would happen if a reporter's blog became so popular that it outpaced her column? Does she leave the column, which undoubtedly makes the paper more money because it is sold with the physical paper? Or would her employer pull the plug on her blog at the risk of losing her? After all, a few of the top bloggers rake in a cool 6 figures a year. All it would take for a popular journalist-blogger to leave a newspaper would be a hyperlink to her new blog.

Source: Chicago Business, Contra Costa Times (Wall Street Journal article) 

Do sales of the Times vary from day to day depending on what columnists are in it? Just like it has been predicted that television is dead because there is video on demand, is the weekly column dead? Are readers going to be looking for it all the time?