Newspapers Woo Readers To The Web

(AP)  As newspapers increasingly become a two-way medium thanks to the Internet, publishers are trying even more ways to get readers and advertisers involved with their Web sites.

How to go about that, and how to grow that side of their business fast enough to compensate for weakness in print, was a big topic on Wednesday, the second and final day of an annual conference for newspaper executives in New York.

Executives from industry leader Gannett Co., The New York Times Co., Lee Enterprises Inc. and others discussed the rapid transformation of their business in presentations and panel talks at the conference hosted by the Newspaper Association of America, an industry group.

Sue Clark-Johnson, head of Gannett's newspaper division, said the company's newspaper in Fort Myers, Fla., was employing a number of mobile journalists, or "MoJos," to scour the community for local news to be posted online, some of which can later be published in print.

"Our research tells us that readers want more hyper-local news," Clark-Johnson said.

Over at Gannett's USA Today, the largest-selling daily in the United States, online advertising revenue rose 15.9 percent in the year to date.

Publisher Craig Moon said the paper was seeing great viewership growth from its 13 blogs, with 5 million page views in May alone, but he said the paper was maintaining a "conservative approach" to them, reviewing all posts before they went online. Moon said there were no plans at the moment for advertising tied specifically to the blogs.

At Lee Enterprises, which owns many dailies in smaller markets, Greg Schermer, the head of online operations, said online community discussion areas were attracting interest from readers as well as advertisers.

Getting advertisers to consider a newspaper's overall reach in both print and online is another initiative being pushed by the industry. Janet Robinson, CEO of The New York Times Co., said the industry has done "a wonderful job" making that case to advertisers.

Newspapers are seeing generally strong growth in online advertising of around 35 percent, but few expect that rate to continue. More troubling is the continuing weakness in print advertising, which still makes up around 94 percent of the industry's revenue, according to analysts' estimates.

As a result, newspaper stocks have come under heavy pressure from investors in recent months over concerns that readers and advertisers will continue to migrate to the Internet.

Paul Ginocchio, an analyst with Deutsche Bank, said that while the various online investments of newspapers are sure to pay off, investors remain skeptical as to when that will occur.

"The public market's not willing to put money in today for an inflection point that's not going to occur — if we continue at the same rate — until '08," Ginocchio said.