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Yes there's more competition from sites like fark and digg. But all of those sites have also seen declines in the past three months as well. In fact, U.S. news sites in general are seeing fewer readers AS A PERCENTAGE OF INTERNET USERS, which is what Alexa primarily measures. Page views are relatively flat - some up some down:

Percentage change of % Internet Users (Last 3 months):
Digg -12%
New York Post -12%
Fox News -19%
Chicago Tribune -20%
Free Republic -23%
CNN -23%
Houston Chronicle -23%
NY Times -24%
Fark -24%
MSNBC -28%
Wall Street Journal -29%

Percentage change of % Page Views (Last 3 months):
Digg +13%
Fark +9%
Fox News +8%
Houston Chronicle +6%
New York Post +3%
CNN +2%
Chicago Tribune 0%
Wall Street Journal -3%
Free Republic -7%
New York Times -8%
Huffington Post -9%
MSNBC -11%
Moveon.org -17%
Daily Kos -18%
Democratic Underground -25%

As you can see, the lefty sites are getting creamed in that metric.

The real growth is coming from sites like You Tube (+28%/+11%) and social networking sites like Facebook (+42%/+11%) and, to a lesser extent, MySpace (+10%/-1%).

You also have to remember that Alexa measures users worldwide. The U.S. Internet market is relatively mature. As more non-English speaking foreigners get on the Internet, U.S. sites will fall in the percentage of Internet users visiting the site metric.

By the way, if the Alexa results are to be believed, Free Republic has a pretty large international following. Only 68.3% of users are from the U.S. - believe it or not, fairly comparable to the New York Times and CNN.