What percentage of Internet search traffic involves newspaper web
sites? I don't need extreme precision in this answer, but do need
confidence in the rough percentages and the sourcing.

This might be of interest to you:

"Research released by the Newspaper Association of America says Web
surfers searching for local news online are most likely to look to
online newspapers. The telephone survey of 2,000 online consumers in
February [2002] found 62 percent go to newspaper sites, while 55
percent go to Yahoo (YHOO), local TV station sites draw 39 percent,
and America Online (AOL) is the choice of 37 percent. In addition, the
longer someone has been an online user, the more likely he is to turn
to online newspapers for news and information, the NAA reported during
the group's annual convention now underway in New Orleans."

http://spassmeister.com/2002_04_01_old.html

hi hweaver-ga

According to Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/browse/categories?catid=206)
the most popular online version of newspaper (New York Times) only get
118 for traffic rank today
(http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=http://www.nytimes.com/)

And have 6.600 reach per million user. (Reach is :  Reach measures the
number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all
Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like
yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random
samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that
280,000 of them visit yahoo.com. Alexa expresses reach as number of
users per million. Alexa's one-week and three-month average reach are
measures of daily reach, averaged over the specified time period. The
reach rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on their reach. The
three-month changes are determined by comparing a site's current reach
and reach rank with its values from three month ago.)

Comparing this with Google (no #1 topsites on Alexa today) with
162,500 reach. You can see the difference :)

As the top site for news, I think it's CNN.com (no #4 top sites on
Alexa) with 18,050 reach.

I hope this help.

Regards,
tinx78-ga