Health of the Newspaper Industry

If you were sleeping at the wheel, this story would give you an aha moment: “The basic newspaper, when you take out the Internet and all the other targeted publications that people are starting, is just not growing,” said P. Anthony Ridder, CEO of Knight Ridder.

While newspaper websites are attracting an increasing number of online ads, those ads are cheap and bring in only a fraction of the revenue that print ads do. And while some newspapers now have more readers on their Web sites than they have in print, most are reluctant to charge for their content online, depriving themselves of revenue from their most popular product, says the story.

However some say the industry is reinventing itself: Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group explained the calculation: “By 2010, we could be generating half our operating profit from online,” he said. “That will cause us to add to our online resources and shift down on print. That’s bad if you’re in print and get laid off, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing for the paper or the industry.”