"We have for years allowed ourselves to be held hostage to one metric only," says Jay R. Smith, chairman of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) and president of Cox Newspapers Inc. "Newspapers have for the last couple of years been finding whole new pockets of audiences for which they get no credit."

I've often wondered why there seemed to be such a consensus that the newspaper business was in a state of chronic decline, when their total audience is clearly growing thanks to the Web. I probably read articles from a dozen different newspapers each day -- via links from the blogosphere -- while ten years ago, I read only one. Given that the online ad model is finally starting to pay dividends, I don't see the cause for all the doomsaying...

Dispelling the Myth of Readership Decline

Comments

[Bill Seitz]

Well, it seems to me that the profitability of newspapers has historically come from monopoly pricing on local advertising.

So if a growing portion of your readers aren't local, do your traditional local-market advertisers want to pay to reach the non-locals?

And if you try to be more general-ad-driven, then you're competing with Google on price...