Last week's numbers on online advertising revenue made grim reading, though some spinning might have left you thinking that things are going entirely to plan.

Web Newspaper Advertising Up 19 Percent as AP put it sounds like quite good news. The fact that online has increased its share of total revenues at newspapers by 31.5% (up from 5.7% to 7.5% of total revenue) isn't much to brag about. The scale of that rise reflects the decline in other revenues. The number is inconveniently close to what I predicted  the optimistic increase in ad revenue for newspapers would be back in July 2007. Back then though I was using it to show that online revenue in its entirety wouldn't even cover the cost of 50% of current staff by 2015. It's starting from such a low base that it just can't make up for the decline of print intime for any kind of orderly transformation. And here we are.

If you don't believe in newspapers then you just shrug and say that there isn't any choice. And if you could harness the shrugging going on in newspaper boardrooms right now for peaceful purposes you could power a nice new Goss Universal for a year.  If you don't believe it's possible to halt the decline of print sales, then you don't believe in any future for newspapers as we know them. You won't able to fund the original content you produce now, so what do you become? One of a hundred other local content providers with nothing but an increasingly tarnished brand to trade off. As an industry we have to make print work. Or we won't be an industry for long.