Before the Internet, if newspapers wanted to know who was reading what, they had to rely on intuition and unreliable reader surveys, reports the New York Times. This ignorance of consumers' taste allowed newspapers to blissfully cover the stories that were important without an afterthought of who would be actually reading the content: once a reader had bought the paper, who knows what they actually read. Now, with technologies that track what people actually consume, editors are more aware of which articles get the most hits and what content sparks the interest of readers. These new methods of surveying readers befits the economics of the newspaper industry, but will papers become too self conscious of their readers' judgements and stop covering important stories?

Conventional knowledge dictates that younger generations dominate social media trends. However, older adults are now the largest growing demographic for use of social media. Pew Research found that between April 2009 to May 2010, the number of adults aged 50-64 who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Linkedin grew 88%, while usage among adults who are 64 and over went up by 100%. Editor&Publisher recently wrote an article stating newspapers' largest readership base is 55 years, and according to Pew Research this age group may be spending increasingly more time online.

While internet users ages 18-49 still dominate social platforms, when it concerns consuming news online the statistics appear relatively equal across generations. 44% of users ages 18-29 and 45% of users ages 30-49 read their news online. By comparison, users aged 50-64 who consume their news online is not too far behind the younger population at 42%, while the 64+ age category falls behind at 34%.Yet as social media use continues to grow among people 50 years and older, newspapers will be able fully employ Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms to increase the consumption of news among a wider spectrum of users.

Newly launched MouseTrace offers website owners the ability to find out detailed activities of visitors. It "provides a complete view of how your visitors are using your website, recording every click, mouse movement," according to information provided on the product website: so website owners can see the exact paths that users take around their sites.

Declaring itself not a traditional 'web stats' company, MouseTrace works in collaboration with existing stats packages on a website, Google Analytics for example. It is able to monitor activity of an unlimited number of pages on a website, including secure (ssl) pages. It also monitors iPhone activity, providing information on page scrolling and zooming, as well as gestures and device rotation.

Tools already offering the same service include clicktale and mouseflow. Clicktale describes itself as being so detailed "as if you were looking over (the user's) shoulder." It also offers heatmaps, so you can "see how much attention a specific website area gets from your visitors. Find what content your visitors care about the most, what they read, and what they completely skip over." Mouseflow offers playbacks of the visitor's session, and "page analysis from the visitor's perspective."

ComScore Media Metrix Rankings of Top 50 US properties for June 2010 have revealed the absence of any traditional newspaper websites among the top ten. Considering most of these websites have recently put in some effort towards improvement, there were much higher expectations than the statistics reported.

In any case, it was not an all gloomy tale as newspaper ratings were considerably higher than the same report from June 2009. Tribune Interactive, with 28m hits and The Washington Post Company with 26m hits made it to numbers 40 and 47 respectively, even though they were not at all on the list last year. New York Times Digital shot up three places to claim 13th, with a viewership of 69m. This is good news, but will this change when the NYT's paywall is implemented in January?

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft remained the top three visited sites, with better traffic than last year. Highly controversial content farm Demand Media moved up from 25th to 17th place, experiencing a near-doubling of traffic with 55m visitors compared to last years 29m. The role content farms have to play in journalism has been recently discussed at length.