newspaper

Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton has been bitten by a vampire. He claims that Google is the “digital vampire” that has been “sucking the blood” out of the newspaper industry. I totally agree!

Yup, that’s a B as in billion. Just when you think the newspaper industry can’t take another hit it gets hit with a haymaker. According to TechCrunch, the Newspaper Association of America reported a 28.28% year over year in Q1.

About two-dozen newspaper executives met in Chicago Thursday to discuss the future of the struggling industry and come up with ways to charge for their online content. The gathering was part of the Newspaper Association of America's annual event and included top executives from the New York Times, Gannett, E.W. Scripps, McClatchy, Hearst Newspapers and MediaNews Group among others.

For a while, the blogs were burning with the rumors that Google was going to buy a newspaper. Eric Schmidt has laid these suspicions to rest by announcing that Google will not pursue that option.

MediaNews Group, owner of the Denver Post and 53 other daily newspapers plans to start charging for online access to all its newspaper content on its websites. MediaNews CEO William Dean Singleton wrote a memo to employees saying, "We cannot continue to give all our content away for free."

In April, the cover of the Newspaper Association of America’s trade magazine Presstime pleaded “Don’t Stop the Presses!,” the don’t and the exclamation point in bright red, confident and defiant serif font.

While the newspaper industry continues to struggle, one bright spot is online visitors to newspaper Web sites increased 10.5 percent in the first quarter of 2009 attracting an average of 73.3 million monthly unique visitors, according to a report from Nielsen Online commissioned by the Newspaper Association of America.

Google says it does not misappropriate newspaper content and actually helps them by driving traffic to their Web sites.