The transition for newspapers from print to online is incomplete, and possibly unsuccessful. But online newspapers have definitely gained momentum, with usage up 11 percent from last year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. At the same time, the Audit Bureau of Circulation reports that print circulation dropped about 2 points.

Nielsen suggests that the growth in online usage hasn’t necessarily come at the expense of print. Just 22 percent of newspaper readers told Nielsen they are now relying more on the online edition than the print edition. Seven percent say they go either way, probably based on whether they’re in the office or not. Seventy-one percent of readers still prefer print.

For newspapers, then, online appears to be the battlefield for attracting the rising majority of non-readers, who currently get their news fix from TV, the portals, and other national news sites.

Nielsen VP of Analytics Charles Buchwalter told The Local Onliner that the shift in battle fields from print to the Web makes sense. “News and information (on the Web) is pretty darn vibrant,” he said. One driver of newspaper sites, and other news sites, is the rise of RSS news feeds. The ability to add newspaper feeds means that people are accessing more newspapers, more often, said Buchwalter – even though RSS has “not penetrated significantly” at this point.

While online trends such as RSS usage would seem to favor national sites such as The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post, Buchwalter says he was surprised to see strong usage from smaller, local sites that bring in national users. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, for instance, showed strong growth because of the national and regional appeal of its Green Bay Packers football coverage.

Beside RSS, another reason for the jump in usage is that people are accessing newspaper websites from several computers – although Nielsen tries to count them as one user, said Buchwalter. “It’s a tremendous part of it.” A third reason is that many newspapers are simply doing a better job of driving traffic – and getting credit for it. “The Washington Post is doing a very good job with their data analytics and their continuity links” he added.

Just to be provocative, I asked Buchwalter why newspaper sites always register fairly good numbers when casual surveys suggest that few people actually use them. His answer is that many people don’t really remember that the feature article they read, or traffic report, or news headline, was actually part of the newspaper site. “It isn’t as if they are lying” to Nielsen’s researchers, he said. While there remains “a tremendous disconnect between quantitative and qualitative data, the real click stream behavior measured by Nielsen “is irrefutable.”