THE easy equation says `news sells`, and it often does, in a way. For a pre-budget paper, or one that leads on Obama`s victory, sales figures take a sudden lift. A slower build towards a moment of history can have much the same effect.

MSNBC, the most liberal of US cable networks, saw its year-on-year ratings jump by 158 per cent in the last three weeks of the presidential campaign and its website broke all its records in the seven days before the vote, with 25 million unique visitors.

CNN and Fox also enjoyed fantastic viewing numbers and web figures. Who could ask for more? Only, perhaps, that the boom doesn`t turn to bust. But it seems to be doing that, and rather too quickly.

When the New York Times or Washington Post crunch numbers, they find MSNBC.com down 6.4 million unique users — that`s 25 per cent — in a week, and CNN.com more than eight million adrift. Web usage is diving, and cable usage along with it. And how do you top a 488 per cent web surge in a year? The clear winner in the American blogging stakes, Arianna Huffington`s Huffington Post, scored mightily as the race grew hotter, but has now had to raise a third tranche of $15m so it can keep running hard through the more mundane months of an Obama administration.

In one sense, it`s rather heartening. Young people haven`t turned off news. Indeed, when political news grips their imagination, participation is huge and intense. But when the story goes off the boil, too much of the audience goes with it. And the gains are not shared equally between competing media.

Most of America`s newspapers have endured a rotten circulation year, with losses of between five and ten per cent commonplace. Obama`s rise did nothing for them in the long term. Equally, major network news bulletins — the bread and butter of ordinary coverage — seem to have held up well through the grey business of cabinet-building slow and steady stays in the race.

— The Guardian, London