Right now, The Local has five sites spread across New York and New Jersey. In addition to these handful of sites, the NYT’s has been adding a local print presence in cites like San Francisco and Chicago to retain or boost circulation. For the moment at least, the SF and Chicago print editions are mainly concentrating on building up circulation revenue for the NYT; they are paired with online microsites.

But when it comes to online, there is a stepped-up focus on driving more ad revenue, though initiatives on that front remain in the nascent stage.

Like many newspapers, as national and other major advertisers have cut back spending, publishers are turning to local ads as a heretofore untapped resource. But as recent forecasts from researchers like BIA/Kelsey and Borrell Associates have shown, the online marketplace still has room to growth. Conversely, the effects of the economy have hampered much of expected gains as many publishers have suddenly turned their attention to local online ad sales.

Nevertheless, the NYTimes.com should be able to see some incremental benefits from the additional ad sources as it continues to rollout more community sites. By next year, the blogs, including The Local sites, will fall under the meter system, NYTCo (NYSE: NYT) executives told an audience at our paidContent 2010 conference on Friday. One of the challenges the company has right now is building up enough interest from readers and advertisers before the meter starts running, as some could be turned off by having to pay for access to articles. Release

Perhaps the most positive sign: digital advertising revenue was up nearly 11 percent across the company, aided by a strong performance from the About Group. The company expects Q1 digital advertising to be about the same. The digital ad numbers weren’t as good for the News Media Group, but still an increase of 4.1 percent to $56.1 million compared with a 20 percent drop for print; the total ad decrease was 17.1 percent. Similar to reports from other companies, the rate of decline across national, retail and classified lessened heading into 2010, a sign that the worst may be in the rear view mirror.

Internet revenue now accounts for about 15 percent of the total for NYTCo, up from 12 percent in Q408, and for 13.8 percent of the company’s revenue on 2009. Internet revenue rose 10.3 percent, to $102 million from $92.5 million in Q408; the increase was about the same for internet advertising — 10.6 percent, to $90.6 million from $81.9 million. Reflecting that nasty year, overall internet revenue for 2009 was down 4.1 percent to $337.4 million, while internet ad revenues for the News Media Group ended the year down nearly 11 percent.

[David adds] About Group: The segment that houses guide site About.com, along with other NYTCo online properties ConsumerSearch.com, UCompareHealthCare.com and Calorie-Count.com, experienced a considerable turnaround from Q408. Total About Group revenues grew 21.8 percent to $36.3 million. The unit attributed to both cost-per-click and display revenues. In contrast, the About Group’s revenues fell 2.9 percent in Q408.

Profits were also robust at About, as earnings grew 80.3 percent to $18 million, thanks in part to a reduction in expenses, which declined 7.6 percent to $18.3 million.

Earnings release | Webcast

– IHT.com disappears: IHT.com users from today are redirected to global.nytimes.com, which is branded with the IHT masthead but which also serves as a new homepage to NYTimes.com for visitors outside the US. Non-US visitors to NYTimes.com are now automatically shuffled along to global.nytimes.com, but can pick which version they want in much the same way WSJ.com users can pick the European, Chinese and other editions. NYTimes.com will get to add IHT.com’s existing 2.3 million non-US monthly uniques to its own 25 million worldwide users as it tries to build audience for advertisers. IHT has had some problems redirecting archive articles, however.

– Dead-tree makeover: A redesigned paper edition looks like The New York Times in all but masthead logo, which itself has a slightly new typeface and more emphasis on the word “international”. There are more web links than before, pointing to global.nytimes.com.

The press release was issued from IHT’s Paris HQ and stresses the IHT will “is edited from New York, Paris and Hong Kong to provide users with a 24/7 flow” – but some native-European IHT fans are shedding tears at what IHT publisher Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, in that release, says is “closer integration with New York”. The paper was founded in 1887 and was only bought in part by NYTCo 80 years later; it’s sold in 180 countries. IHT’s fantastic international coverage is so barely rivaled by indigenous papers that many European intelligentsia buy IHT without regard for the New York connection – Europeans don’t often identify national and international news with metropolitan titles (eg. there’s no London Times), so NYTCo would do well do retain the IHT brand.

After NYTCo a deal inked in 2007. IHT escaped NYTCo cuts that axed 100 business-side staff and introduced pay cuts last week. More in Dunbar-Johnson’s note to readers…

Photo, illustrating new edition on left, old edition on right, courtesy Graham Holliday

– James Fallows: The Atlantic Monthly journalist, who has been living in China for the past three years, shakes his head at the decision to block NYTimes.com. Calling the use of the Great Chinese Firewall “just strange,” Fallow’s writes: “China’s official PR machinery often succeeds mainly in making the country seem far more closed-off, impenetrable, defensive, and difficult to deal with than it actually is most places most of the time… The vast majority of Chinese net users would never look at NYTimes.com anyway — it’s in the wrong language. Those who really want to see what’s on there can find a way to do so, despite the block. And how confident, open-minded, rules-abiding, modern and so on will the episode make the Chinese government look in other countries’ eyes?” Fallows has a little more on China and NYTimes.com here.

Warren will manage all business operations for NYTimes.com, and will report to Martin Nisenholtz, SVP for digital operations. Warren will also continue to lead all ad sales efforts for NYT Media Group, reporting to Scott Heekin-Canedy, president and GM, The New York Times.

– David adds: Aside from having to fill Schiller’s role, which had its shares of hits and misses, Warren takes on the roles of setting direction of the company’s advertising efforts and NYTimes.com during a time of enormous challenges. On the ad front, spending is slowing sharply at all newspapers and the NYT is by no means immune. Online advertising is slowly making up a greater share of revenues, but the 10.2 percent gain in web ad dollars in Q3 could not offset the general 14.4 percent decline in advertising. Building ad revenues has been difficult enough this past year, but with the increasing deterioration in the wider economy showing no sign of stopping, keeping revenues from falling too far already looks like a gargantuan task. Add to that the increasing encroachment of the WSJ into ad categories like luxury, an area the NYT previously faced little newspaper competition, and Warren’s list of issues to deal with becomes much tougher. What she has going for her is the aggressive stance the paper has taken to experimenting on a number of digital initiatives. In addition to text alerts, adopting Twitter early on and creating its iPhone app, this week’s decision to give aggregated content a more prominent place on the home page has given NYT a fairly solid foundation for one day offsetting the losses on the traditional publishing side.

Photo Credit: The New York Times

I spoke with NYTimes.com GM Vivian Schiller about the new sub-sections and how they fit in with its goals to have more targeted content and ads during an increasingly difficult time for the newspaper business. To support the expansion, Schiller says the paper has hired a handful of reporters from WSJ, Dow Jones, WaPo, The Economist, Financial Times, and others, with more to come.

– Targeting and privacy: The recent moves are part of a larger effort to better focus the site’s ad sales. Last month, NYTimes.com struck an alliance with LinkedIn on targeting news stories and ads at their respective readers and members. With the issue of ad targeting receiving intense scrutiny from lawmakers and privacy advocates, Schiller insists that personal data is sacrosanct. And since the program serves content to users as well as ads, Schiller believes the company has achieved the perfect balance. Schiller: “We are getting a level of detail for ad targeting purposes in order to target content as well. It

If NYTimes.com had added TimesPeople a couple of years ago, I might have been wowed. Instead, it’s more like whelmed. Pages with TimesPeople enabled take longer to load and provide less real estate for actual news. (On the other hand, at least the toolbar is only visible when I’m on NYTimes.com.) The idea of claiming people as “My People” whether or not you even know them is a little off-putting. Still, it’s another sign of the willingness to experiment. If it winds up only limited to people trying to follow what Times staffers are doing — and those staffers actually keep updating, that’s probably the lowest form of engagement. But if the service keeps evolving and — big “if” coming — if even a small percentage of readers become users by creating NYTimes.com-based networks of their own, the potential is significant. In the meantime, if you’re looking for me, try sdkstl.

Video embedded below is of CNET (NSDQ: CNET) News.com’s Caroline McCarthy interviewing two NYTimes.com software engineers, courtesy of CNET and Beet.tv: