{"id":2622,"date":"2008-09-02T17:47:42","date_gmt":"2008-09-02T21:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=2622"},"modified":"2008-09-02T17:47:42","modified_gmt":"2008-09-02T21:47:42","slug":"virtual-newspaper-has-67-million-readers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/09\/02\/virtual-newspaper-has-67-million-readers\/","title":{"rendered":"Virtual newspaper has 6.7 million readers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From the Los Angeles Times (via a post at <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wired.com\/business\/2008\/09\/penguin-paper-d.html\">Wired<\/a>) comes the news that a little-known &#8220;newspaper&#8221; called the Club Penguin Times apparently has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/business\/la-fi-clubpenguin30-2008aug30,0,550794.story\">almost 7 million subscribers<\/a>, many of whom read the paper at least once a week. And where is this newspaper published? Inside Club Penguin, the virtual world for kids that was developed by a trio of parents from the tiny town of Kelowna, B.C. and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/2007\/08\/01\/disney-acquires-club-penguin\/\">bought by Disney<\/a> last year in a deal worth as much as $750-million. As the L.A. Times notes, that readership makes the Club Penguin paper bigger than either the New York Daily News or the Chicago Tribune, among others. <\/p>\n<p>Obviously, there are differences between an online journal published for kids between 6 and 14 and traditional newspapers in the real world, but that&#8217;s still a huge number. The Club Penguin &#8220;paper&#8221; gets about 30,000 submissions a day from readers for its poetry contests, its &#8220;Aunt Arctic&#8221; advice column and other features (much of the content in the newspaper is created by users). And best of all, the Penguin Times doesn&#8217;t have to worry about advertising &#8212; it doesn&#8217;t carry any. <\/p>\n<p>Lane Merrifield, the CEO of Club Penguin and an extremely nice guy, was one of our keynote speakers at mesh 2008 last May. There&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mdialog.com\/video\/show\/9275-lane-merrifield-keynote---going-viral\">some video of his talk<\/a> with Stuart MacDonald at mDialog.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the Los Angeles Times (via a post at Wired) comes the news that a little-known &#8220;newspaper&#8221; called the Club Penguin Times apparently has almost 7 million subscribers, many of whom read the paper at least once a week. And where is this newspaper published? Inside Club Penguin, the virtual world for kids that was &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/09\/02\/virtual-newspaper-has-67-million-readers\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Virtual newspaper has 6.7 million readers&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2622\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}