"Look at most newspaper web sites," Forman said. "We've taken an old model and applied it to a new medium."

"Old ways of doing business are difficult to change," he said, but one truth carries over from paper to electronic publishing: "Quality pays."

Other cautions were sounded in the Feb. 13 keynote.

"Death can come swiftly to a market leader," said Dorothea Coccoli Palsho, president of business information services for Dow Jones & Co., parent of the Wall Street Journal.

Information overkill is one of the dangers she cited among those plaguing the Internet's current news leaders.

"One of the assets of the Wall Street Journal (http://www.wsj.com/) and other great newspapers is what we don't report," she said, citing insignificant events, "me-too" product launches and other material that really doesn't deserve the attention of the major information companies.

"If the Internet looks like a slam-dunk, why wouldn't everyone want to do what we're doing?" Palsho asked. "Well, just about everyone does."

While "everyone wants to be a publisher," she said, having a well-respected name like the Wall Street Journal carries benefits for both publisher and consumer other publishers can't match.

The scheduled Feb. 15 keynote speaker, Nick Grouf, president and chief executive officer of Firefly Network Inc., couldn't make his way to Houston because heavy fog in Boston grounded his flight.

In his place, we heard Joelle Gropper, director of news and community tools for Firefly. She gave an overview of Firefly (http://www.firefly.com/) and its "collaborative filtering" concept, in which users define their preferences in movies and music, and Firefly links them to other movies and music they might like, and to people who share the same "taste space."

Firefly's concept is "basically word of mouth on a turbocharged, global scale," she said.

It's also an example of the kind of change other speakers discussed. Newspaper companies are trying just about anything in an effort to pick up some advertising (or, in some cases, subscriber) dollars from the Web.

"What's at risk?" asked new media consultants Kathleen Criner and Jane Wilson in a tandem presentation. Classified advertising, for one thing -- it's a $13 billion business, and it accounts for as much as 40 percent of a newspaper's advertising revenue and as much as 50 percent of its profits.

Newspapers face a possible loss of advertising revenue to both old and new competitors, they said.

"On-line could blindside newspapers, just as direct mail did in the '80s," Criner said.

Banner bantering
Part of that danger arises from newspaper web sites' failure to draw national advertising because national advertisers can't build and distribute advertising in standardized sizes.

"There is absolutely no consistency" in banner sizes, placement and other advertising considerations, said Marsha Stoltman, vice president of marketing relations for Editor & Publisher magazine (http://www.mediainfo.com/), one of the sponsors of the conference.

Stoltman reported the results of the magazine's Eighth Annual Interactive Services Study, a poll of newspaper on-line services. Among the study's findings was that newspaper on-line services typically employ one advertising representative, one technical support person and two editorial people with reported average annual earnings of $50,000.

"Those respondents who were generating higher-than-average revenue do not have higher-than-average staffing," she reported.

Michael O'Hara, general manager of the weekly Princeton (N.J.) Packet (http://www.pacpub.com/), dismissed the trend among newspaper web sites to refuse to link to anything outside the paper's own site.

"We link to everybody and their dog from our site," he said. "We want people to start their day with our site, spend a few minutes, and we don't care if they leave."

O'Hara also pointed out that the size and deadline structure of a newspaper doesn't matter in the on-line world.

"What's the difference between a daily and a weekly," he asked, "when you're on-line all day every day?"

George Irish, vice president/group executive for newspapers for the Hearst Corp. (http://www.hearstcorp.com/), reminded his audience of the evolution of media during the 20th century.

The radio experience in the 1920s was diminished by the noise, static and hiss inherent in AM radio, he said.

When static-free FM radio came along, it was not an ordinary innovation, but a revolution, Irish said. The death of AM radio was predicted, but AM found its niche and survived.

Next, television added pictures to sound. The death of radio -- AM and FM -- was predicted, but each band found its audience and survived.

"What will ensure our future, just as it always has in the past," Irish said, "is the talent in this room."

-- David Galloway

From THE COLE PAPERS, March 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.