Any day now Jules Molenda will launch a Web site for the daily newspapers he runs in New York state's Hudson Valley and he's pleased to know he won't be the last in America to do so.
"You mean we're not the very last ones?" says Molenda, publisher of the Hudson Register-Star and the Catskill Daily Mail. "I thought we were the caboose here."
No, some other newspaper will be the last to leave the 20th century and have to turn out the light. Fewer than 100 of the 1,400 U.S. dailies and several hundred community weeklies have resisted setting up news sites on the Internet, or in some cases abandoned ones they started.
But newspapers that publish only with ink and paper are dwindling by the week, with about 2,200 now online.
The recent converts are succumbing to pressure from customers while devising ways to avoid losing money from the start, unlike larger publishers who poured vats of cash into a future that never arrived as planned.
And as often with technology, the laggards have benefited from the trial and error of the pioneers.
Small newspapers that have recently added Web sites have been more aggressive in seeking paid subscriptions for them.
Because of software innovations, papers need little time and scant manpower to reformat news and ad files to accommodate the Internet - a far cry from years ago when media chains added hundreds of electronic employees they later had to let go.
Some small papers also are among the first to experiment with paid "electronic editions" that resemble their printed versions. The electronic versions can be counted toward circulation totals, which affects the price of advertising.
"The smaller markets have been more aggressive since they are concerned about losing their print audience to the Web," said Rob Runett, manager of electronic media analysis for the Newspaper Association of America, a trade group based in Vienna, Va.
"At one time, there was talk from the Bill Gateses and Ted Turners of the world that this would be the end of newspapers. For some fourth-generation newspaper publishers, that was daunting. Plus, it required all kinds of new skill sets that they didn't have."
Small and midsized papers have occasionally been more adept online than the major metropolitan dailies - or Gates himself, who gave up his attempt at an online entertainment news service in 1999.
Among the innovators, the 65,000-circulation Topeka Capital-Journal in Kansas has received national awards for Web design. In Southern Maryland, the weekly St. Mary's Today provides an online, audio link to the police and fire department scanner for readers who thirst for local crime news, and crusades against drunken driving by listing every DWI arrest in its area.
The Wall Street Journal, owned by Dow Jones & Co., is regarded as one of the rare commercial successes for newspaper Web sites, with about 650,000 paid subscribers.
'Digital' staff cuts
Other large media companies, including the New York Times Co., the Washington Post Co. and Tribune Co., owner of The Sun, have cut back "digital" staffs and are beginning to see profits or pare their losses.
Some have also massed forces to create classified-ad sites such as CareerBuilder.com to fend off Monster.com, a Web-only source of help-wanted ads that has begun taking aim at blue-collar categories and the smaller markets.
According to a survey by the World Association of Newspapers in Paris this year, 38 percent of North American newspapers reported a profit on their electronic operations, 26 percent broke even and 31 percent are losing money.
That's an improvement from two years ago when more than half of all papers were in the red on the Web.
This isn't the first time the industry has scrambled in response to the obituary technology has written for it.
After radio arrived in the 1920s, newspapers halved the number of stories on their front pages to stress depth of coverage over immediacy.
A generation later, television caused newspapers to further reduce front-page headlines and add photography and color. The latest threat won't be the last one either: For example, wireless pages that can be updated electronically - a newspaper you'd never throw away - are in development.
But for now the Internet is the innovation causing the hand-wringing and brainstorming.
Some hesitant
"A lot of the smaller papers have been hesitant to make heavy investments in the Web because they haven't seen a business model that shows a return," said Shaun Dail, an executive with Olive Software, a Denver company that develops Internet software for newspapers. "It was something they wanted to do. They were waiting for the right tool."
Marc Wilson, who helped found one of the companies that provide technical support for newspaper Web sites, said when he first discussed the Internet with publishers in the mid-1990s, many responded by saying they hoped "to retire before all this happened."
He and his partners capitalized on publisher anxiety to sell their expertise, employing what they called the "fud" principle: fear, uncertainty and dread.
They understood little about the new medium in 1994 but felt they had a head start because they had created an electronic bulletin board years earlier so that small papers like the one they owned then in Bigfork, Mont., could swap state legislative news.
"At election time, the weeklies in Montana would trade all these stories on the bulletin board and were amazed. It was like the first time someone turned on a radio and heard music," said Wilson, a former Associated Press correspondent.
"By 1994, we saw what the Internet was doing and we said we'd better get involved in this or we'll never be in business again. We'd tell other publishers, 'You ought to put your paper on the Internet.' They'd say, 'I don't know what the heck you're talking about.' And I didn't know what the heck I was talking about.
"For newspapers that hadn't changed anything since Gutenberg, now all of a sudden they had the coolest new product around to sell. In most cases, it's the only circulation growth they're seeing," Wilson said.
Lee Enterprises Inc., a media company in Davenport, Iowa, bought a majority share of his company in 1996 and increased its stake to 80 percent in 2000.
Known as TownNews.com, it now hosts 700 sites for newspapers and sends in SWAT members - Special Web Advertising Teams - to reorient newspaper sales staffs for the Internet.
It charges papers an average of $5,000 a year and says it generates three to 10 times that sum in Web classified ad revenue.
TownNews.com grew 40 percent last year and 50 percent in 2000, Wilson said, although the pace has slowed this year.
Lee is also a partner with 11 other media chains and venture investors in another newspaper Internet consultant, PowerOneMedia Inc. of Troy, N.Y. The company was formed last year from the merger of two other companies. It serves 1,600 dailies and weeklies, representing half of the U.S. newspaper circulation, the company said.
There are smaller providers, too, including Our-Hometown.com, a one-man operation run by Stephen Larson in Clifton Springs, N.Y.
Poised at a computer in his summer cottage on Cayuga Lake, Larson services and updates Web pages for 50 papers, mostly in the Northeast, for about $3,500 a year apiece. He employs four college students part time who electronically reformat thousands of articles each week to accommodate Web sites.
Two years ago, "it was real easy to get customers, two or three a week without any problem at all. Everyone was hearing about the Net and it was going crazy, but that waned," said Larson, a software engineer by training.
"We've been able to keep most of our customers, but some smaller papers are dropping out of it. We've worked out the advertising model, but some of these papers are so small, it's hard to sell the thing."
In upstate New York, Jules Molenda's shift to cyberspace has been as gradual as the change overtaking his area.
Rural Columbia and Greene counties have seen an influx of antique shops and pricey homes as the exurbs ooze from New York City, a two-hour train ride away.
However, the landscape that inspired the Hudson River School of painting 150 years ago has barely changed and the most unsettling headlines describe a fight over a cement-plant project and a murder or two a year.
John Johnson, whose father founded the newspaper company in 1919, couldn't be convinced the Internet offered a business opportunity.
Giving away the fruits of his 17 daily and weekly papers to anyone with a personal computer didn't make sense, he said.
After he died in 2000, his sons, Harold and John, decided they could no longer resist a medium that two-thirds of Americans use regularly. Their flagship, the 35,000-circulation Watertown Daily Times, began a full Web site for paid subscribers last year.
"The major hesitation I had was whether we should do the New York Times thing and give the paper away over the Web and that struck me as foolish," said Molenda, who oversees two of the group's dailies and four weeklies.
"Since the Times began their Web site, the last three years I haven't purchased a New York Times ever and I didn't want my readers to come to the same conclusion about me.
"If you're a small outfit like we are and stay close to your cash box, you can't do it and lose money. But several times a week somebody would call here and ask for our Web site. It wasn't overwhelming, but at some point you say readers keep asking this question," he said.
Management eventually decided to post a "modest version" that will include a sampling of top stories and obituaries. Online obits are a huge attraction for the community papers. That's especially true in cold-weather locales where many senior "snowbirds" flee south for the winter and want timely notice if an acquaintance dies while they're gone.
By charging an extra $1 per classified advertisement for the increased exposure online, Molenda estimates the Web site will generate less than 1 percent of his total revenue. More important, however, it won't drain the company until the day someone figures out a more profitable model on the Web.
Some in the industry may delight in the irony that the personal computer is expected to vanish faster than newspapers, replaced by more portable devices, but Molenda isn't smug about the future.
"It hasn't happened yet and I'm pretty sure I'll be long retired by the time it does, but at some point, we'll realize the business of killing trees is inefficient," said Molenda, 55.
His focus now is more immediate, however, counting the days until the launch of "registerstar.com" and "thedailymail.org."
He would have preferred a ".com" name for the Daily Mail, too, but the company failed to send in $35 to renew the registration on the domain name it once owned - dailymail.com. A paper with the same name in Charleston, W. Va., scooped it up before he realized it.