Or so suggests Toronto Star columnist David Olive as he shoves the Cassandras of gloom and doom aside … He argues that the combination of the “newsgathering prowess and editing acumen of newspapers, married with the multimedia and interactivity features on online publishing,” can turn newspaper sites into dominant news and information sources. Some of his signs:
– the total print and online audience of nearly 25 million for the top three U.S. papers — USAT, WSJ and NYT — is almost five times the size of the print circulation alone.
– Online newpaper readership is up 11 percent so far in 2005, outpacing the growth of the internet overall. “Despite the generally lame efforts by newspapers to market their Web editions, almost one-quarter of U.S. Internet users, or 39 million Americans, read newspaper websites.”
– Newspaper sites are more often the most widely read in their communities. (This came up during the Lee Enterprises session at CSFB Media Week — Lee says in most of its markets, the web site comes in only second to the newspaper’s print circulation and is often a larger audience than the #1 local TV newscast.)
– Olive notes a “sense of Web urgency” at his own paper, where editor-in-chief Giles Gherson told the staff recently the Star is making up for lost time and that “the Web is our collective future.”
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