Fans flock to Disney's Club Penguin Times

The
newspaper industry is constantly bewailing its need for a new economic
model, as the Internet upends the old one. Maybe it could take a page
from the Club Penguin Times.

The Club Penguin Times, after all,
is more widely read than New York's Daily News, the Chicago Tribune or
the Dallas Morning News. And it's not even 3 years old.

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But this weekly "newspaper" isn't tossed onto driveways or sold at newsstands.

Rather,
it's an online publication distributed to the estimated 6.7 million
monthly users of Club Penguin, a snow-covered virtual world visited by
more than 12 million kids, who adopt a colorful penguin persona and
waddle around, playing games and meeting new friends.

Though no
one would suggest that the Club Penguin Times provides Pulitzer
Prize-worthy coverage, it nonetheless attracts 30,000 daily submissions
from children, who pose questions to Dear Abby-inspired "Aunt Arctic,"
compose verse for the poetry corner, tell a joke or review a party or
event.

Kids ages 6 to 14 generate much of the editorial
content, which is augmented by staff features such as the most recent
story about decorating on a shoestring -- "a great igloo needn't break
the bank." A full-time staff of three plus one part-timer sift through
the submissions, searching for those with the broadest appeal and
selecting the questions most frequently asked of the advice columnist.

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