NEW YORK - On the other side of the current economic "convulsion period," there will be opportunities and a good business model to support local media, E.W. Scripps Co. President and CEO Rich Boehne said Wednesday at the 36th Annual Global Media and Communications Conference.

Over the past 15 years, Scripps has shifted its portfolio into smaller and mid-sized markets for its print holdings, he said. Currently, all Scripps newspapers are profitable except for the Rocky Mountain News, which the company put up for sale last week.

Currently, the business structures and revenue environment are drastically different for newspapers, said Time Stautberg, senior vice president and CFO, at the UBS conference. Scripps is looking to consolidate horizontal newspaper businesses, and thinking about newspapers as local media enterprises, he said.

As an industry, "we seem to be willing to diminish the product itself to protect the packaging," Boehne said. The seven-day-a-week print product has become the package, he said. "I'm not sure that's our business anymore."

Boehne said he views the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium as a turning point for the industry, as a time when newspapers came together for the common good. In the future, he said next year will likely be one of the most difficult year he has ever worked in, and importance will be placed on "making sure everything is healthy." That means a healthy balance sheet, little debt and making sure individual businesses, like newspapers and broadcast stations, stay profitable.