Rieder: Newspaper association chief optimistic

• NAA President Caroline Little sees some bright spots for newspapers
• She%27s excited about the advent of new newspaper owners like Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett
• But the industry faces serious challenges as it struggles to adapt to the digital age

Being president and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America is not a job for the fainthearted.

Your mission includes lobbying for, speaking for and galvanizing an industry that, while it is the press, hasn't gotten very much good press, not for a long time.

It's been fashionable for years now to write off newspapers as relics of a vanished era, as dinosaurs who are too dumb to know they are supposed to die, as orphans who have no place in the glitzy, fast-moving digital age.

But recently, there have been some modestly hopeful signs for the embattled creatures as they struggle to transform for a digital future. And Caroline Little, who has been the NAA's head honcho for just over two years, hardly seems engulfed by desolation.

"Today looks rosier than things did two years ago," she tells me over lunch. In fact, she adds defiantly, "Newspapers have the winds against our backs."

There's no doubt that formidable challenges lurk, and that the continuing erosion of print advertising is a major worry. Much work remains to be done. But there are some upbeat developments as well for a business that hasn't encountered many for a while.

• Charging for digital content has given newspapers a desperately needed new revenue stream. Thanks to digital-only and, significantly, bundled subscriptions as well as price hikes, circulation revenue was up 5% last year, the first time that's happened since 2003.

• Newspapers are also having some success bringing in money from sources other than advertising and circulation. Providing marketing services has proved a promising route for some.

• Despite many missteps, false starts and lost opportunities as the digital revolution unfolded, newspapers, at least some of them, are now much more open to desperately needed innovation.

• An intriguing array of new players has joined the ranks of newspaper owners, among them Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and investor extraordinaire Warren Buffett. Bezos is buying The Washington Post, and Buffett, who once said he wouldn't buy newspapers "at any price," has gone on a shopping spree in recent years and now owns 30 dailies.

"Jeff Bezos is not investing in some loser asset," Little says. "He's not a dummy. Neither is Warren Buffett."

Little, a lawyer, has a background in digital news. She served as publisher and CEO of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive and later as CEO of British newspaper The Guardian's U.S. operations, including its digital properties. One of the things that sold her on the NAA gig was the opportunity to bring a much more digital approach to the organization, which is based in Arlington, Va., in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

And as she looks around the landscape, she likes a lot of what she sees. "Publishers and editors recognize that things need to change, and they are changing," she says. "Places are doing innovative things that take advantage of digital content."

She points to the Deseret News in Salt Lake City. There, Clark Gilbert, a former Harvard business professor, has pushed digital growth and — rather than than continuing to have the newspaper try to do everything with far fewer resources — has embraced a laser-like focus on six high-interest issues. And there's The Dallas Morning News, which has placed heavy emphasis on expanding its marketing services business.

Little also takes solace in surveys that show a high percentage of people continue to read newspapers, whether in print, on desktops, on smartphones or on tablets. "If you don't have a newspaper media presence, there's a lot less to tweet about," she says.

The newspaper industry, the NAA chief points out, is hardly alone in having been upended by the digital monsoon. "Name one media business that has not been profoundly disrupted," she says. "Cable, the nightly news, the music business. Look at what happened to AOL."

Not that she takes a Pollyanna-like view of how the industry responded — "I do see the gloomy parts." For one thing, newspapers were slow to embrace the Internet. "I don't think anyone anticipated just how big this was." And she thinks the business clung too stubbornly to the notion that it could replicate its print business model — selling lots of lucrative ads — in the cyberworld.

Little also stresses that "getting the technology right can't be underestimated" — and newspaper companies are not tech companies. Technological sophistication has been crucial to the success of the Amazons and the Apples of the world. And The New York Times didn't just set up a tollbooth when it started asking customers to pay for its digital wares. It invested heavily to build the sophisticated meter that has been so critical to the success of its porous paywall.

But while a powerful digital presence is the key to the future, Little isn't so sure that the newspaper part of the newspaper business will vanish anytime soon.

"I don't think," she says, "that print is going to go away."

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