Oh, the print editions are still dying, but Web sites are improving and becoming more popular.

In fact, newspaper Web sites are doing better than ever:

The Newspaper Association of America reported the number of unique visitors to newspaper Web sites last year rose more than 6 percent to a monthly average of 60 million. Monthly visits climbed 9 percent in the fourth quarter from a year ago.

No one is going to scuff at 6 percent growth, but we need to do more, and I’m confident we can. We need double digit growth for the next few years, because it’s the only way to reverse the decline of newspapers.

But consider this: The industry is experiencing 6 percent growth despite the fact that the majority of newspapers have bad Web products and most papers haven’t put significant resources into their Web products. Imagine the kind of growth newspapers could have if they put real investment into their Web sites.

That’s pretty exciting to me. This report tells me that people still value newspaper content. People, however, are increasingly going online to consume newspaper content.

Newspaper need to seize on this positive data to make real and substantive investment in their Web sites. They all should have a beautiful user interface like CNN, deep database content like EveryBlock and LoudonExtra and great multimedia content like MediaStorm and The New York Times. And go local.

It’s not that difficult: take some resources from the declining print side and put them into the growing Web side. Newspapers cannot wait for their print editions to bottom out before making a strong push on the Web. Let’s be proactive and go where our users want us to go.

The Web is a friend of newspapers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Mainstream Media, State of journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.