Bloomberg, optimistic about print's future

In the digital age, where national ad sales and web expansion are the focus, traditional papers must work together to survive, reports Ad Age from a Newspaper Association of America meeting this week.

Speakers at the meeting included Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Newmark believes newspapers could learn a thing or two from crowd-sourcing, something Craigslist harnessed early on. Online newspapers would grow more compelling to readers if they were actually part of the press.

Bloomberg stressed that though controversial subjects, like the Terry Schiavo Story, which pitted one ideology against another, sell papers, publishers must realize it is also their duty to tell the public "what's going on."

The advice may have rung soft to a professional crowd acutely aware of the differences between themselves and their speakers. "We have no advertisers to keep happy, no investors to keep happy, which is a relief," admitted Newmark.