Fighting hard against
the rubbish heap

Even as local papers try to adjust to online ad sales, they have already lost a lot of ground to larger players, reports The Wall Street Journal.

New research from Borrell Associates finds that pure-play web companies now rake in the majority of local online ad dollars. Companies that exist solely online brought in 43.7 percent of the $8.5 billion local online ad market this year.

Local papers, on the other hand, saw their share of the market slip from 44.1 percent in 2004 to just 33.4 percent in 2007.

The shift results from a combination of initial missteps by local newspapers, a heavy emphasis on the local market by Google and other players, and myriad other factors.

The realization that they need to play catch-up in order to survive also drives publishers into the arms of Yahoo and others who are eager to do deals with local papers.

Optimistic analysts admonish newspapers to forego such devil's pacts, asserting hard work by individual papers will allow them to survive online.

For their part, newspapers are doing what they can to survive the online onslaught. In November a group of large newspaper brands banded together to compete against Yahoo's print coalition.

The Newspaper National Network LP also released a study that finds newspaper site users are over 50 percent more likely to be influencers — the holy grail of demographics.