As competition rises in Poland's national newspaper market, publishing company Agora is getting hit hard by the market economy its flagship paper, Gazeta Wyborcza, helped usher in.

“Although Gazeta Wyborcza is very important, over time the importance of traditional media will fade,” Marek Sowa, Agora's recent chief executive appointee, told the Financial Times.

Sowa, who rose to the position in August after being an electronic media executive, is now faced with helping the company branch out into the Internet and television in hopes of returning the company to sustained profitability, the Financial Times reported.

Agora became one of Poland's biggest icons when Gazeta Wyborcza was launched, marking the end of communism. Wanda Rapaczynska took Agora public in 1992, also giving it weight in not only the print sector, but in radio and outdoor advertising as well.

This all changed in 2006, when German-based Axel Springer launched its daily, Dziennik, to directly compete with Gazeta Wyborcza. Agora cut its daily's cover price and launched a tabloid, which folded in three months. Revenues fell from 1 billion zlotys ($367 million) in 2005 to 936 million zlotys ($349.1 million) in 2006, and lost nine million zlotys (3.4 million) in profit in 2006, according to the Financial Times.

Although Agora has returned to profitability in the first half of 2007, it faces another hurdle, the launch of another national daily newspaper by publisher Polskapresse, Poland's subsidiary of the German Verlagsgruppe Passau. The new paper could hit newsstands as early as October.

To decrease its dependence on Gazeta Wyborcza for 70 percent of its revenues, Sowa plans to put forth a strategy for Agora by early 2008.

“The skills we have in traditional media can also be transferred online,” Sowa is quoted as saying by the Financial Times. “Information channels are already fairly common. There are a lot of other niches ... The barriers to entry in television are much lower than in the past.”