As Revenues Decline, Newspapers Look Online

BusinessWeek looks at the changes to the Wall Street Journal, and the outlook for newspapers as a whole:

“2007 will be the year that newspapers start revamping their Web sites, filling them with exclusive content and multimedia coverage that can lure both readers and advertisers away from blogs and portals. “2007 will be the year when newspapers stare long and hard at their Web sites,” says Christine Tatum, assistant business editor at The Denver Post.

The reasons for this are not simply to jump on the bandwagon:

“Industry executives and analysts say the paper is going in the right direction and that other publications will have to follow suit or risk folding. The newspaper industry is expected to lose roughly $890 million annually in advertising revenue to the Internet through 2007, according to a March, 2006, report by Citigroup Investment Research (C). And much of the 1.4% growth in advertising overall this year is expected to come from a more than 15% gain in online revenue.”

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