Newspaper companies are utilising the Internet to expand their reach, a recent study has found.

“American Newspapers and the Internet; Threat or Opportunity?" by Bivings Research has found that in 2007, 92 percent of America's top 100 newspaper Web sites now have video on their sites, which grew significantly from 61 percent in 2006.

In addition, among the groups using video online:

39 papers offer original content 26 use AP video streams 13 offer video content from local news outlets Four use all three technologies Ten papers use a mixture of two different types of video

Some other important findings from this study include:

93 papers offer RSS partial text feeds, while three offer full text RSS feeds. No papers have began embedding advertisements in their RSS feeds. 95 percent have at least one reporter blog. 93 percent of these blogs allow comments. In 2006, only 80 percent of the papers offered blogs, with 83 percent allowing comments. 67 percent of newspapers now allow users to leave comments on articles. This represents a 14 percent growth since 2006, when only 19 percent allowed comments on articles. 29 percent of the top 100 newspaper sites require users to register before gaining full access to their Web sites, up six percent from last year. Three papers required a paid subscription, while 26 papers required free registration.