By John Simmerman
Contra Costa Times
Published: 8/1/2006
Excerpt:
MediaNews Group Inc., the pending owner of the Contra Costa Times, hopes to
harness its newfound Bay Area newspaper dominance on the Internet with
a regional Web site that aims to be a model for how old-guard
newspapers can work and make money online.
Denver-based MediaNews and its owner, William Dean Singleton, are
discussing a regional Internet collaboration among its 11 Bay Area
newspapers and possibly its lone regional rival, the San Francisco
Chronicle. ...
...That kind of collaboration would be aimed at stanching the tide of
readers who gravitate to Yahoo, Google News and other news aggregators
that dominate the Internet market. A survey released Sunday by the Pew
Research Center found that MSNBC, Yahoo, CNN, Google and AOL crush even
the biggest national newspapers.
The same survey found that while newspapers' online editions have
helped stem more severe losses in readership, they have not done much
to add an audience or compete effectively with their online rivals.
Very few people read the local newspaper online only, and when they do,
they do not read very long, mostly scanning headlines.
That has made it difficult for newspapers to make money from online
advertising. Just 5.5 percent of newspaper industry revenue comes from
online sources, according to the Newspaper Association of America. ...
... Ultimately, online newspapers will need more than one way to tease
money from the Internet, said Bill Mitchell, online editor of the
Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism think tank.
"The idea of news organizations coming to grips with the reality of
their readers relying on a variety of news sources and figuring out a
way to generate revenue from that reality seems to me to be smart on
both counts," he said.
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