Opinion: Diversification is the key for online news sites

Philip M. Stone confronts a problem in his column for FollowTheMedia.com, the problem of the additional digital revenue earned from news web sites not covering the analog dollars lost by print products. Stone considers a solution: he advocates running additional web sites that have nothing to do with news but that can attract the real masses and hopefully new advertisers - such as social networking sites for the local community? This is what Mecom are doing.

David Montgomery, Mecom executive chairman, is convinced that newspaper companies need to make more than just the price of a newspaper from its readers.

"We are launching new websites at a rate of one a week," Montgomery said as his company announced disappointing results for the first half of the year. "A single copy of a newspaper per customer is no longer adequate. We have got to provide media in as many different forms as possible"

Source: FollowtheMedia.com