CHICAGO, March 2 (UPI) -- An avid sports fan who produces a Web log on the Boston Red Sox is bought out by a major daily newspaper and hired as a sports producer for its Web site.
This may sound like some wishful thinking, like some tenuous scenario in one of those fantasy baseball leagues many fans join, but the blog BostonDirtDogs.com, founded by Steve Silva, is now part of The Boston Globe online. Silva is now filing regular reports from the World Series champion Red Sox spring-training site in Florida.
"Newspapers are doing a lot of experiments online," said Chuck Richard, vice president and lead analyst at Outsell Inc., a research firm in Boston that tracks online advertising and publishing. "They're trying to go beyond the old model of newspapers and become community resources for their readers."
Online publishing ventures once were regarded as mere supplements to print publications, but now they are starting to surpass them in influence for many readers, experts told UPI's The Web. The result will be dramatic changes in the publishing industry in the coming years, they said.
"There is limited space in newspapers for certain features, like book reviews," said Tim Bete, director of the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop at the University of Dayton in Ohio. "But online publications have unlimited space. They can host chats with authors and post reviews. These then can be archived for years, and available through a Google search. With a regular newspaper, the information appears and disappears the next day."
Back in 1995, many newspapers and magazines just posted their old features and news on their online sites. Since then, people's information habits have changed dramatically. Now, news organizations routinely send headlines to consumers' personal digital assistants and mobile phones. They also generate e-mail news updates.
Moreover, the news organizations, because of online publishing technologies, are reducing the space devoted to certain news, such stock quotes, in the print editions of their publications.
"Publishers are worried about the latency of the news that they deliver," Richard told The Web. "They are measuring the time they deliver stories in the thousandths of a second."
Major publishers, such as The Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal, have changed their online-publishing projects, Richard said. The Post purchased Slate.com, and the Times and the Journal also have acquired online properties.
"They now are in the information business, whereas in the past they would have considered themselves newspaper publishers," said Richard. "They realize the containers they provide the information in do not matter as much as the information itself."
The online projects are allowing these publishers to target their markets more precisely. A site called TechTrends.com illustrates the trend, Richard explained. The site has more than 20 different areas readers can search for specific technology-trend information and advertisers can target those little niches with online ads, reaching the people who want to buy what they are selling.
"They are making products based on the criticality of need for information updates," he said.
Online ad sales are expected to grow 40 percent this year, Richard said, after having grown 25 percent last year. He added that ad sales for print publications finally have stabilized, after several rough years. Online sales are helping to support the newspapers' revenue models.
"For consumer publications, 20 percent of revenues comes from subscriptions and the rest from advertising and other sources," Richard said.
Because of demographic changes, however, many younger -- thirty-something and twenty-something -- consumers do not read print newspapers on a daily basis, though they do read magazines. So online publications, produced by the major print publishers, are being designed to attract their attention, even for a small fraction of their time.
"If you lose a newspaper reader, you can not equal that with an online reader," Richard said. "The ad rates are lower online. Banner ads are underpriced online, even though the click-through model is very effective. No one clicks on an ad for the hell of it. They click because they want more information."
Interesting, he said, but pressure from Internet ads is influencing the way buyers of ads for print publications think.
"Because they can determine the return on investment of an online ad, they are asking for the same thing from newspapers. They are shifting that demand to newspapers and asking, 'How do I know what I am getting from you?'" Richard said.
Online media have created something of a "transition period" for the major media, he continued, one the media will be contending with for a long time, as advertising rates adjust to the factors of the new economy.
"Some wire services are starting to post live feed from other, live news sources on their sites," Richard said. "They realize that people are no longer going to stay in one confined space online. You can't make a Web site into a walled garden. That is a losing proposition."
Other publishers, such as the online technology site CNET.com, are posting links to blogs of individuals who refer to CNET stories. "That's a feedback loop that they are creating," Richard said.
Awards have emerged to acknowledge the creative accomplishments of the online publishers, such as the Webby awards, created by Tiffany Shlain.
Prominent editors, such as Janet Siroto -- formerly executive editor of Cosmopolitan and Redbook -- are now working for online sites, like Match.com, which is launching a pop-culture, trend-focused online magazine.
Even academic publishing is being impacted. Recently, David Bricker of Indiana University sat in on a session at a conference sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science about online academic publishing.
"Essentially," Bricker noted, "all the speakers said the same thing: traditional business models aren't working. For publishers to make money, something must change."
There is no doubt online publishing is a threat to conventional print media, Richard said, "but it is also a huge upside proposition for the publishing industry."
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Gene Koprowski is a 2004 Winner of the Lilly Endowment Award for journalism for this column for United Press International. He covers telecommunications technologies for UPI Science News. E-mail: [email protected]
