"They just glared at us," Cruickshank said. "They said, 'Don't give us any [bull] about readership.' "
Then there is the revenue gap. For instance, for the first nine months of 2004, The Post booked $433 million in ad revenue. For the same period, Washingtonpost.com reported $45 million in revenue, hardly enough to support a newsgathering staff the size of The Post's.
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Ads on a newspaper's Web site actually can be worth more to advertisers than ads in the paper, said David D. Hiller, vice president of publishing for Tribune Co. Reason: Unlike a newspaper ad, which provides no feedback, Internet ads can tell advertisers how many times the ad has been seen, and, with Web site registration, the demographics and location of the viewer.
"Circulation is only a blunt proxy for readership," Hiller said. Papers may eventually convince advertisers of the value of Internet ads, he said. "I'm not sure you can right now."
Newspaper companies are by no means close to extinction. Most large companies continue to report healthy profits, and ad revenues appear to be picking up. But classified advertising, specifically help-wanted ads, is a bellwether of how newspapers are regarded as effective advertising tools. Increasingly, employers are using other resources to recruit workers.
Morgan Stanley estimated that, from 1998 through the end of last year, revenue generated by Internet help-wanted ads would grow 400 percent. During the same time, revenue from newspaper help-wanted ads was projected to drop 40 percent.
Randall Birkwood, director of recruitment for cell phone company T-Mobile USA Inc., said his company is still happy with the results it gets from its help-wanted listings in newspapers, but he said such listings amount to only about 30 percent of T-Mobile's total recruitment-ad budget. The company has moved most of its help-wanted advertising from newspapers to its own Web site.
"There are more opportunities for us to spend our dollars in other places to attract talent," Birkwood said.
Many newspapers recognized the Internet's combination of threat and potential early on and have plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into Web sites of their own, hoping to keep readers, even if they don't leaf through the actual paper. In 2003, the New York Times' Web site became profitable for the first time; last year, The Post's Web site did the same.
But working against newspaper Web sites is the fact that the Internet has trained users that most content -- including news -- should be free. Users generally will pay only for specialized information, such as the in-depth financial reporting provided by the Wall Street Journal, which charges a subscription fee to read stories on its Web site.
"Newspaper publishers have not done a very good job of creating value for what we create," said L. Gordon Crovitz, president of electronic publishing for Dow Jones & Co. "Too many publishers have trained consumers to devalue [newspaper] brands and content."
General-interest papers such as The Post and the New York Times are playing a sort of game of chicken with each other: None wants to be the first to charge to use the Web site, fearing that users will refuse and simply migrate to a competitor whose site still is free. Papers, however, have begun using their Web sites to provide Internet-only content that gives in-depth information on everything from football to politics beyond what is available in the newspaper. In future scenarios, such content may require a paid subscription. A potential model is ESPN's Web site, which includes a great deal of free content but charges $6.95 a month for its premium "Insider" reports. In the online news industry, this is called moving content "behind the wall."
Caroline H. Little, publisher of Washingtonpost.com, said the site has considered charging for premium content, but she is worried by examples she has seen elsewhere in the industry. The New York Times recently hinted it may start charging for some of its Internet content.
"So, not to say that it's not a possibility in the future, but our first priority is growing our audience, and this would clearly hinder that," Little wrote in an e-mail. About 80 percent of washingtonpost.com users live outside the Washington area, the site's research shows.
The good news for newspaper Web sites is that, after the 2001 dot-com crash, Internet advertising has roared back, exceeding previous highs. Total Internet ad spending in the first six months of 2004 was 40 percent higher than in the comparable period in 2003, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
The sobering news? Internet advertising still accounts for only about 3 percent of total ad spending each year.
