(91) {{U}}In the last few years the conventional wisdom has been that the advent of the new media will hasten the demise of print, and that the culture of print will soon be a thing of the past.{{/U}}
But I wonder whether this confuses the content with the attachment we have to a particular kind of container. In fact, (92) {{U}}a number of recent developments suggest that new media may actually be the salvation of old media, and could preserve and extend the best aspects of the print culture,{{/U}} while augmenting it with their various technological advantages. If this is true, then the future of old media is in embracing the new—a development we see most clearly with newspapers.
Newspapers have been spurred by a simple economic fact: (93) {{U}}more than a third of their revenue comes from classified advertising, which readily lends itself to searchable Web sites.{{/U}} In a defensive move, newspapers quickly and heavily invested in such online sites as CareerPath. corn, PowerAdz. corn, AdOne and Classified Ventures, and also use those companies for added exposure for national ads. Most have also put their own local classifieds online.
(94) {{U}}The Web sites, meanwhile, have become a way to broaden and deepen Newspapers' content as a potential source of revenue, as home pages attract new advertisers and subscribers.{{/U}}
Knight Ridder's Real Cities network (RealCities. corn) is a good example. The portal site gets news from the chain's thirty-one dailies, as well as from Belo and Central newspapers, who are partners in the operation. And it features directories of community resources and business, classifieds, entertainment, shopping, free e-mail, community publishing, and search capability. Real Cities brought Knight Ridder $ 31.4 million in revenue in 1999.
The New York Times is another. The paper's robust Web site has attracted 11.4 million registered non-paying readers ( as of April, up 61.9 percent from a year earlier). In order to get access to the site, readers must offer some basic personal data, which will eventually be used for direct marketing. (95) {{U}}By 1999 nearly half of those registered readers reported that they had never purchased a paper copy of the Times, which means that the online version was introducing the brand to an entirely new group.{{/U}} The Web presence also helps the Times's print circulation; the paper gained some 12,000 new subscribers via the site in the first half of 1999.