Our managing editor, Karen Peterson, said something recently that struck at the heart of what a lot of us at The News Tribune are feeling these days.

“I’m tired of people patting me on the head and saying, ‘I’m so sorry for you guys about that Internet thing,’” is the way she phrased it, before concluding, “Don’t they see that we ARE the Internet and that newspapers are STILL a strong business?”

Well, no they don’t, on either count.

So here is some information you might not know.

On the Internet side:

 • Our Web site, thenewstribune.com, continues to grow rapidly. Our monthly unique visitors increased 7.5 percent for the six months just ended (829,027) versus the prior six months (770,824).

Page views on thenewstribune.com grew 12.7 percent during the same period, with an average of 5.4 million pages viewed per month during the most recent six months.

Our monthly unique visitors are up 35 percent when compared to last year.

 • McClatchy, our parent company, is an owner of CareerBuilder.com, the largest Internet job site.

 • McClatchy also is an owner of Classified Ventures, which produces Cars.com, Apartments.com and Homescape.com, which are among the leading Web sites in their market segments.

 • Online revenue growth for McClatchy was up 10.6 percent in the first quarter of this year. Not counting the weak employment category (hey, we’re in a recession, some say), online revenue was up 52 percent.

Online revenue accounted for 11.3 percent of total revenue for the company in the first quarter, a 31 percent increase over the 2007 average.

 • Newspapers are by far the leaders in local Internet activity. Newspapers nationally are 3-to-1 leaders over competitors in local advertising market share on the Internet.

Newspaper-owned Web sites earned more than $2 billion in local online advertising revenue last year, a figure that surpasses all local online media companies combined, according to a study by Borrell Associates.

To sum up: It’s OK if the Internet is out there. Increasingly, we ARE the internet.

On the newspaper side:

 • Newspaper readership is higher than it’s ever been, even though circulation has fallen slightly in the past few years. That’s happening because the readership of newspapers on the Internet is growing much faster than the modest circulation declines.

 • We may be the only mass medium whose total audience is growing. That’s the single biggest factor in thriving and surviving long term.

 • Financially, newspapers remain strong.

The stocks of all advertiser-supported businesses drop in an economic downturn: Year-to-date Google is off 16.1 percent, McClatchy 25.88 percent, CBS 14.06 percent and Belo, which owns KING-5, is off 23.52 percent. (Belo’s decline is for only three months, the period after it split its broadcast and newspaper divisions into separate companies.)

Newspaper stock prices have fared relatively worse, perhaps because of declines in classified advertising, but their cash flows remain strong compared to almost any industry. McClatchy continues to have solid cash flow despite paying down $800 million in debt last year.

 • I’m occasionally asked, “Is there less news in the paper?”

Advertising is off a bit, and the paper may seem smaller some days, but the newshole – the amount of space devoted to news – has remained stable since 1999, which is as far back as I have numbers.

The only significant year-to-year changes in that period were after the dot-com bust in 2001 and in the past year. In each case, the news space dropped 5 percent to 6 percent.

In the dot-com bust, I think the 6 percent loss of news was real, although we grew it back over the next two years.

I would argue that this time, the 5 percent reduction we project (including some section combinations we haven’t completely decided upon) results in negligible lost news. What we cut this time were stocks listings and movie listings from the VideoWeek TV guide, things that readers no longer look to the newspaper to provide.

I don’t mean to gloss over some real problems. Advertising revenues are down, and we’re struggling to trim expenses to compensate. But those problems should not obscure the underlying strength.

Our businesses remain strong and continue to have bright futures.

Dave Zeeck: 253-597-8434

david.zeeck@thenewstribune.com

blogs.thenewstribune.com/editors