Colorado's major newspaper trade group is focused more than ever on helping newspapers get more revenue support from readers as society moves deeper into the digital age.

Dan Petty

Dan Petty, president of the Colorado Press Association and director of audience development for MediaNews Group, said Internet-based advertising has irrevocably changed the business model for daily and weekly newspapers.

MediaNews Group owns the Denver Post, the Boulder Daily Camera and a number of other Colorado newspaper including, through a subsidiary, the Journal-Advocate.

Speaking recently to members of the Sterling, Brush and Fort Morgan Rotary clubs, Petty said that in the past newspapers derived around 80 percent of their revenue from advertising and about 20 percent from subscriptions. That ratio has changed radically, Petty said, as newspapers compete for a dwindling advertising revenue stream.

In 2005 the newspaper industry pulled in about $50 billion in ad revenue, Petty said, but today that number is around $8 billion. Of every dollar spent on digital advertising in the U.S., roughly 70 cents goes to the digital Big Three; Facebook, Google and Amazon. That leaves the rest of advertising-supported media to fight over the remaining 30 cents.

"This has seriously disrupted the model by which we pay journalists," Petty said. "The result of all of those changes is we need support from readers more than ever, that's where (the funding) to keep these institutions going is going to come from."

Increasingly, Petty said, people are being asked to pay for news as they click on links in social media that take them to web-based newspaper stories. Major newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post and even The Denver Post have installed paywalls that require readers to pay a small subscription to access the stories.

"I actually think it's a good thing.," Petty said. "It incentivizes us to produce information and news that you can't find anywhere else."

The real benefit to readers and journalists alike, Petty said, is that web-based journalism makes it easy to know what people are reading, and what people are reading is news that's important them and to the journalists covering it.

"What you want to read is (also) what we care about," he said. "And people are willing to pay for information that's valuable."

Petty said it's important for journalists to do all they can to attract readers because of the responsibility they have for the communities they report on.

"These media are institutions in the community, they report on the community you live in," he said. "If they're not here, who is?"