We have been hearing about the imminent collapse of the newspaper business for the past few years. Various reasons are often cited, including: declining revenue from subscriptions and newsstand sales; declining revenue from ad sales in the print editions; and declining revenue from classifieds. In a nutshell, declining revenue from all things print related as reading habits shift from the print medium to digital. And of course the capper—online readers expect content to be free. With a few exceptions, newspaper sites follow a free ad-supported model. The big question now is how will newspapers grow their online revenue (and it is growing) fast enough to offset the declining revenue on the print side.

In some ways the imperative for online newspapers is deceptively obvious—grow your audience and you grow your ad dollars. It is interesting to look at how some newspapers are beginning to tackle this problem. One approach is to become a portal—utilize strong brand recognition and a focus on being the authority around a particular locality. The Boston Globe has taken the portal approach with Boston.com. Boston.com utilizes its brand recognition and content to be the authority on all things Boston. But it does not rely on Boston Globe content exclusively—to do so would make the site just an online version of the newspaper. Instead, they provide a local search feature where they aggregate content from external sources, even competitors.

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The goal is to grow their audience by providing the best service possible. The Boston Globe content and brand may be the centerpiece, but providing the audience with whatever content they need keeps them coming back. The washingtonpost.com has followed a similar model with their city guide feature.

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The New York Times, on the other hand, appears to be moving in a different direction. They recently announced that they were developing a set of APIs to make their content available for consumption outside of NYTimes.com. The strategy here is to disseminate the content as widely as possible and to make it as useful as possible. The thinking seems to be to allow the content to go out and find the audience for the site. As more and more developers build mashups around New York Times content, their audience grows. If the content is mashed up in interesting and creative ways, all the better. Presumably there will be a monetization strategy which will involve driving the audience back to NYTimes.com or perhaps advertising will be delivered as part of the content service.

These two models are hardly mutually exclusive and I think it’s likely that the most successful newspapers will become both a portal and a content service. It will be very interesting to watch this evolve over the next two years or so. Clearly, some newspapers are not going to adapt and will not survive. Others, however, will move into new business models and begin leveraging both technology and their brand equity to become something entirely new.