After we published our study of America's newspapers last week, it was picked up by many international blogs, and compared to newspapers in several countries, including Brazil, Denmark, and Italy.

We found the following Italian blog post, which reports the findings of a new study that examined the top 50 Italian newspapers, published August 7.  An Italian journalist, Lele Dainesi, reported the findings, which orginally appeared on the Italian blog "Pandemia", on his own blog, Mash Ups in Italy.  Apparently our study inspired an Italian blogger to pursue the sister study.  Below is a graph that compares the results of the 25 most circulated papers in the US with the top 25 Italian papers.  The chart also includes stats from papers ranking 75-100 on our list of America's 100 most circulated newspapers. The results are pretty interesting, and show that even the the least circulated papers are offering more Web tools on their sites that the most popular Italian papers: 

Here are some other key results from the study of the top 50 Italian newspapers:

• 19 of the top 50 Italian papers required registration (compared to 23 of the top 100 American papers)
• 12 of the top 50 Italian papers offered forums (compared to 64 of the top 100 American papers)
• Only 3 Italian papers offered podcasts, and only 8 offered blogs (compared to 31 and 80, respectively, here in the States). 

You can view the report here (in Italian, PDF), or Lele's blog here.

A few Danish blogs, (Whyse and Problog) noted the importance of using blogs in today's age of Web 2.0, and regretfully describe how Danish newspapers have been slow to pick up on the blogging trend. 

Based on these pickups, it seems that American newspapers might be setting the bar as far as newspaper sites around the world go.  I think that we will be conducting some additional research to get some more details on this topic…stay tuned.