Scott Karp does the math on the lone bright spot of the newspaper economy – the growth in online business – and calculates that newspaper websites will need nearly 2 trillion ad impressions at a $30 CPM to equal their print revenue. that’s 24 times as much traffic as newspaper sites currently receive, he notes. And that’s assuming that CPMs would hold steady at $30 at those traffic levels.

The Newspaper Association of America said online advertising revenue at newspapers was up 22 percent in the first quarter. However, traffic was up only about five percent. Even if visitor growth continued at that pace indefinitely, it would be many decades before online revenue could equal print sales.

The best path for newspapers, of course, is to get away from anonymous metrics like page views and impressions and move toward an alternative model that monetizes reader engagement and contextual relevance. The trouble is that newspapers are the ultimate mass-market media vehicle. There is no historical or cultural precedent for addressing small markets, which are the most valuable ones to advertisers. The lone bright spot in the picture looks like a flashlight.

Snipping text here from a piece in Ad Age about reading habits that will go behind a paid registration wall in a couple of days:

“As new forms of media consumption, including web surfing, downloading and time-shifted TV viewing gain more of a foothold in the U.S., different generations have begun to form distinct habits. But what’s interesting is that both the old and wise and the young at heart are developing some commonalities as well, according to a new study by Deloitte.

“The consulting and advisory firm found that every generation — from young Millennials (ages 13 to 24) to Generation X (25 to 41) to Baby Boomers (42 to 60) and older Matures (61 to 75) — enjoys reading magazines. Almost three-fourths of all consumers choose to read them even though they can find the same information online. There is also a greater receptivity overall to print ads compared with internet ads, the firm found.”

This is an important point. While most major metro daily newspapers will go out of business in the coming years, lots of print properties will do just fine. Next time you’re at Barnes & Noble, visit the newsstand and look at the racks of thick magazines. There are plenty of viable business models in print. It’s just that large-circ-daily-newspaper isn’t one of them.

NowPublic.com said it raised $10.6 million in venture capital and that more than 100,000 people have submitted material to its citizen journalism site. Other ventures that have gained traction include Korea’s OhMyNews, iBrattleboro.com and Northwest Voice.

Citizen journalism is the future of news. While I don’t think we have any idea what the newspaper (or site) of the future will look like, there’s no question in my mind that it will incorporate many voices from people who aren’t professional journalists. The companies that are experimenting with citizen journalism right now are taking the very first steps in sculpting this future. Most probably won’t make it, but it’s interesting to watch the ideas unfold. The Institute for Interactive Journalism has an informational site about this topic.

Bruce Brugmann writes of how a Bay Area chain buries news of layoffs and consolidation in its East Bay newspapers in an announcement in its San Francisco paper. It doesn’t even mention its own name in the headline.

Robert Wilonsky at Dallas Observer notes that Belo Corp., a major media holding company, refers to 2006 layoffs at its newspapers as “headcount reductions.” I suppose this is what happens when you let the accountants approve the press releases.

A journalism professor suggests that newspapers should reach out to younger readers, noting that most columnists are in their 40s and 50s. A few papers have tried this with dedicated pages or sections authored by teens, but the efforts have appeared half-hearted. My own hometown paper, The Boston Globe, has had a teens page for years, but it always struck me as looking like something designed by someone in their 40s for a teen audience. That doesn’t work.

One approach that does work was to give papers away to schools as required reading in social studies classes. For the last year, my teenage son read the Boston Herald every day because the school got the paper for free. Perhaps this is a good use for the all copies newspapers are no longer printing because of circulation declines. The marginal cost of printing extra issues and adding them to existing delivery routes is nominal. At least it gets the product in the hands of people who may be long-term readers in the future.

Okay, so it ain’t the New York Times, but the death of the print edition of Weekly World News tugs at my heartstrings nonetheless. I was a subscriber for years and eagerly looked forward to each issue’s new accounts of the exploits of space aliens and bat boys.

Actually, for all its absurdity, Weekly World News carried a lot of offbeat and true items. It was a showcase of the lunatic fringe of the human condition and, as such, was often very entertaining. Fortunately, the online version survives.

Publishers continue to find bright spots in otherwise dismal news. Quoting MediaPost:

“The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, flagship paper of Journal Communications, enjoyed an online revenue boom of 46.9%, ending the quarter at $3.4 million. And Mary Junck, chairman and CEO of Lee, noted that ‘our rapid online growth has accelerated to a rate of more than 60% in the last quarter and now accounts for almost 8% of our advertising revenue, surpassing national.'”

That’s good news. However, overall revenues were off $8.5 million in the quarter, or about two-and-a-half times the total of all online business. As bright as the future appears for the online arms of daily newspapers, the rapidity of the decline in print advertising still points to painful cost-cutting if these businesses are going to survive.

What’s different about the two scenarios described in these articles in BtoB Online today?

New York Times Co. earnings fall in second quarter

McGraw-Hill Q2 earnings soar.

I’d suggest that the big difference is in McGraw-Hill’s strength in vertical publishing. If you read these brief articles, you’ll see that both the Times and BusinessWeek suffered declines in print advertising. However, McGraw-Hill’s earnings were boosted by revenues in Aviation Week and other vertical publications.

This goes to the contrast between what’s happening in the newspaper world and everywhere else. Big, broad general-interest publications like newspapers — and including magazines like Time and Newsweek — are suffering from a profusion of alternative information sources. However, certain vertical industries aren’t feeling the pinch at all and are, in fact, growing.

If you pick up an issue of Cigar Aficionado or Brides magazine, you’ll see what I mean. These publications are as fat with advertising as they ever have been. In both cases, readers enjoy sitting down with an elegant print publication and leafing through it, looking at the beautiful pictures. Newspapers, with their awkward format, grainy texture and ink that rubs off on your hands, are a much less enjoyable reading experience.

Just one more reason why it’s not good to be in the newspaper business these days.

The words “newspaper” and “growth” haven’t appeared in the same sentence very often of late, so it’s good to see this encouraging trend documented in BtoB Magazine.

Eugene Robinson has an insightful and engaging column in The Washington Post today about Rupert Murdoch’s bid for The Wall Street Journal. “Take it!” he advises the newspaper’s owners. If they hold out for a white knight, he argues, some cosmetics or packaged foods billionaire who doesn’t know the first thing about newspapering will end up with the goods. Whatever you want to say about Murdoch, he knows and loves newspapers. However, he also thinks it’s his right as an owner to meddle in editorial content, Robinson notes, ominously.

The column is worth reading just for the wonderful analogies:

“Rupert Murdoch tries to buy the Wall Street Journal, and the reaction is as if Lord Voldemort had made an above-market offer for Hogwarts.”

And this one:

“My friend Harold Evans, who once edited the Times of London under Murdoch’s ownership, wrote in a critical book that ‘Murdoch issued promises as prudently as the Weimar Republic issued marks.'”