Top news executives concluded at a U.S. National Press Club forum Wednesday that new measures must be taken to appeal to advertisers to generate the revenues required to keep quality journalism active, the NPC reported on its Web site.

“The business model is clearly broken,” Des Moines Register Publisher Laura Hollingsworth told the forum. She said there is a gap between news content and advertising, as ads may not be following news contents' move to the Web.

Steve Buttry, editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette and GazetteOnline, mentioned that Web advertising has to be seen in an alternate light, as outlets may benefit from having a link to an exterior source that is directly relevant to a news story. For example, bridal announcements can have a link to a bridal registry Web site.

“Think of how much of the content of a traditional newspaper is related to someone's decision to buy something,” Buttry said, according to the NPC. “You can see that if we start becoming the community marketplace where you actually conduct the transaction, that is so much more valuable to the advertiser than just the advertising model of selling eyeballs.”

Although advertisers may be interested in targeting an active audience though material that is relevant to them, Hollingsworth also pointed out that the Register must not abandon its responsibility in “civic engagement and watchdog journalism,” the NPC stated in its article.

“The vision for the Register as a regional information centre is knowing the household, knowing the players in it, and layering products and services that are both digital and print,” Hollingsworth said., according to the NPC

NBC News President Michael Gartner suggested that the newspaper industry should learn from what happened to television news when cable and satellite television posed a threat. To combat that, the three major networks “embraced cable” and cooperated with each other on regular news stories in order to have a larger budget for competitive journalism, Gartner said.

“It was the same dire threat that these folks are facing now. You lost exclusivity, you lost your immediacy, and you lost a big chunk of your audience and a big chunk of your revenue,” he told the forum, according to the NPC.

According to Des Moines KCCI-TV News Director Dave Busiek, television newsrooms are also facing the same challenges as newspaper newsrooms.

“Any newsroom needs a certain number of feet on the street to do original reporting,” he told the forum, according to the NPC. “I don't think there is one right answer. All I know is that if we are not out on the leading edge of trying some of these new ideas and figuring out what works and what doesn't, we're not going to be around very long.”