Inspired by the example of Bill Walsh, who sits not so far from me in National, and his The Blogslot, as well as Rob Curley’s blog, which I just recently discovered, I am rebooting this site to focus on the current professional obsession: the future of the newspaper in the age of the internet, and who’s saying what about that.

Someone was asking me recently is there’s any good data on how the internet has changed how people get political information. Some of what we know:

From Pew:

Twice as many Americans used the internet as their primary source of news about the 2006 campaign compared with the most recent mid-term election in 2002. Some 15% of all American adults say the internet was the place where they got most of their campaign news during the election, up from 7% in the mid-term election of 2002. A post-election survey shows that the 2006 race also produced a notable class of online political activists. Some 23% of those who used the internet for political purposes, the people we call “campaign internet users” actually created or forwarded online original political commentary or politically-related videos.

More from Pew:

On a typical day in August [2006], 26 million Americans were using the internet for news or information about politics and the upcoming mid-term elections. That corresponds to 19% of adult internet users, or 13% of all Americans over the age of 18.

And from the 2007 State of the News Media report:

The data also suggest there is a core audience for newspapers that represents something of a strategic advantage for the medium. People who love to follow the news, and especially those who love politics, prefer newspapers over every other medium.

Two-thirds (66%) of those who follow political news closely prefer newspapers, a full 20 percentage points more than the next most popular medium, network news (at 46%) and 30 points more than CNN (36%). The problem is that only 11% of the public is especially interested in politics, according to the Pew data. …

But newspapers also remain the destination of choice for those who might be called “news junkies” generally — people who say they particularly “enjoy keeping up with the news.” Roughly two-thirds of them chose newspapers first. Network news was a distant second (less than half). And news junkies are a large group of the population (52% of the people surveyed).

Here may be the logical base for the newspaper’s future — people who are particularly attuned to the world around them. And online, newspapers theoretically may be able to increase their share of that group.

That’s the tip of the iceberg, surely. More as I unearth it.