Compared to other major US publishers, Lee’s overall ad revenue ‘only’ dropped from $74.4 million to $72.9 million year-to-year (July numbers), and its online revenues grew 57.2% year to date.

One of Lee’s innovations has been the launch of the Lee Online University, which trained 500 news and salespeople in five two-and-a-half day sessions. Another round of sessions is scheduled for the upcoming year, including a video storytelling course in September. Courses are archived and available to employees through the company’s intranet.

According to Junck, “fully 50% of the adults in our markets prefer to read only a newspaper that they can hold in their hands, and another 11% like to read the printed page as well as visit our online sites.” In that respect, the resilience of print is far more pronounced for midsized-market newspapers.

Thus Lee Enterprises isn’t anywhere near considering web-only publications – contrarily to papers in larger markets, which are already getting a glimpse of this outcome. “The naysayers need to understand that the printed newspaper remains very, very strong among people of all ages,” says Junck.

Wishful thinking? There’s even better news, according to Junck:

“With the exception of auto (advertising), we see much of this as largely cyclical -- which means, we believe, that the ad environment eventually will improve.”

Source: The Motley Fool