• Editor & Publisher, Thursday, April 6, 2006 11 AM

Good news, bad news for the newspaper industry, which daily must wrestle with the widely held presumption that the entire business is just one step away from extinction.  A new study by Scarborough Research reveals that newspaper franchises are very healthy indeed, and that readers still care deeply about them--but that increasingly those readers are connecting with papers online. "Scarborough continues to find that when online readers are considered, the story of newspaper readership for many papers transforms from one of slow and steady decline to one of vibrancy and growth," the firm said this week.  Added Gary Meo, Scarborough's senior vice president of print and Internet services, "This information tells a powerful, positive story -- far from fading, newspaper audiences are thriving and growing thanks to their Web sites." Earlier this week, the National Association of Newspapers released a study with similar findings.  That study reported that some 55 million Americans visit a newspaper Web site at least once a month.

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