Can Online Editions Rescue Newspapers?
Since newspapers typically have the best-trafficked Web sites in their markets and the sites’ ad revenues have grown at a 30% rate for five years now, it would be appealing to think that readership and advertising will simply transfer gradually to the Web.19 Thus could the expensive news-gathering function and newspapers’ public service mission be preserved, and without the cumbersome costs of printing and delivering the paper. Unfortunately, after all that growth, online typically still contributes only 6% or 7% of ad revenues.20 So while developing the new platform, papers can ill afford to take their eye off the ball of a print operation that constitutes 94% of the business. As we noted last year, Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute, a co-author of this chapter on newspapers, in January 2005 ran a rough projection estimating that it would take online a dozen years to pass print as a revenue source, assuming continuation of the trends of 2003 and 2004. Built into that model, in oth
