News publishers are hand-wringers when it comes to the Internet. How do we post our articles and get people to pay for them? How can we sign up online subscribers? What?s going to happen to us if we don?t?

Maybe these publishers are trying to squeeze blood from the wrong silicon chip.

The newsweeklies? Washington City Paper, Village Voice and Chicago Reader have free Web sites that draw viewers who send them many thousands of dollars. These publications are bringing in money, without subscriptions, even as media news is hot with content-based sites that have closed down such as Feed. One lesson these weeklies teach is that Salon and other subscription-hawkers might be trying to sell the wrong content. The Reader and others are selling value-added classified services like e-mail notices. Their editorial content ? the long, investigative articles and snappy reviews ? are almost beside the point.

The good news for publishers is that sites have shown that Web viewers will pay hard dollars for online content. But it?s bad news for journalists, because viewers aren?t paying for the stuff we value, the articles.

'In the long run, it?s going to be bad for journalism,' reflected the Reader?s Executive Editor Mike Lenehan. 'We have our fun and earn our self-respect and we contribute something meaningful to the world by doing journalism which is paid for by that other thing (classifieds and ads). I?m afraid that what the Web is going to do is separate those things. . . . it?s going to uncouple the data delivery from the news or the literature of the world around you,' he said.

The classified content that customers pay for at the City Paper, the Village Voice and the Reader is local. It?s where to get a job or find an apartment in the reader?s city, or perhaps hook up with an eligible bachelor or bachelorette.

The wide reach of Salon and other universal content sites, with their essays, stories and articles unchained from a real-world locale, is one reason they make such intriguing reading. How often does a local newspaper simultaneously run staff-written articles on anti-abortion activists using video technology and the death of muckraking biographer J.H. Hatfield next to the latest installment of a serialized novel, as Salon did in a recent posting?

These universal sites possess powerful editorial, but their global reach may be an advertising weakness. They have no local classifieds to draw paying work-searchers and apartment-hunters online. Meanwhile, the Chicago Reader rakes in about 3,000 paid apartment listings every week.

Pinpointing the USP

Weeklies are sprouting like weeds. Readers flock to weeklies? paper editions for their investigative pieces and opinions, their arts and music coverage, their unique visions of city life. In 1978, the newly formed Association of Alternative Newsweeklies boasted 24 member publications in the United States. Today, there are 125, and many applicants don?t get voted into membership.

It?s not all roses and sunshine for weeklies seeking a Web presence, though. When weeklies go online, they lack a daily news feed bringing in viewers, and also must take on the added competition of sites such as Citysearch and AOL?s Digital Cities. These competitors entice viewers looking for the weeklies? staple of restaurant and cultural listings.

Many weeklies put their print stories online with little additional material or Web-exclusive content. Though boring, that?s a legitimate approach for a news business already strained and occupied, said Richard Karpel, AAN?s executive director.

'Like a lot of other publishers, [we] are still struggling to make it work for them,' Karpel said. '[P]utting out a newspaper every week is tough. . . . What you?re talking about is creating a news business [online]. It?s not something that?s going to happen overnight while you?re already spending 99 percent of your time focused on a business you already have.'

A few weeklies have endured and gone on to create authentic Web companion sites, coupled with editorial or ancillary services, like searchable restaurant listings.

Some sites stylistically break out of the generic white-background-with-this-week?s-cover format, among them Vermont?s Seven Days and the Detroit Metro Times, which is perhaps the coolest-looking weekly site around. It also has a sizzling personals section, with more than 4,500 romance classifieds.

Others have focused on creating reader feedback. In a bid to enhance its position as the city?s music news source, the Washington (D.C.) City Paper features a Web-exclusive 'inDC' section, with online-only local music news and a discussion board that hums with participants. On the West Coast, the San Francisco Bay Guardian has created something of an actual online community, running half a dozen active chat rooms fueled by sex banter and lefty-to-radical politics. A couple of weeklies? Web sites even make money.

With its clean, simple lay-out, the Chicago Reader site is a functional companion to its paper publication. While the printed Reader has garnered fame for its lengthy features, don?t look for them online. Instead, the site is a universe of classifieds, reviews and night life listings, the publication?s bread and butter content. They must be doing something right in Chicago: According to Lenehan, the executive editor, the Web site is raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Serious journalism and long articles won?t capture online interest, he said. 'The reason most people are picking up the Reader is to see who?s playing a gig next weekend, or things like that. . . . I always said that we?re writing our cover stories for 10 percent of the readers, and it was the people buying the sofa beds and going to the clubs who were sort of subsidizing that effort.'

The star of chireader.com is SpaceFinder ('the apartment-search Web site in Chicago'), which captures about 10 percent of the site?s 1.4 million monthly page views. SpaceFinder works as it allows readers to search the rental ad database instead of wading through 25 pages of seven-point type. By Web standards, it?s a roaring success.

From the word go five years ago, explained Publisher Jane Levine, the company has only placed that content online it thought worked more effectively than in print. That?s why the paper?s archives are going online, but not its current cover stories.

SpaceFinder charges about $4 per ad. The publication?s spent about $1.5 million developing its Web site and maintaining the digital infrastructure in over the past five years, Levine said in an interview with OJR. Meanwhile, it runs about 3,000 rental ads a week. Citing their online popularity, the Reader charges $30 for the first 25 words of a housing or want ad, which is $4 more than other classifieds.

Simple arithmetic demonstrates that this $4 difference equals about $12,000 each week due to SpaceFinder, if one assigns the entire difference to that online function.

'It all depends on how you want to do the accounting. Once we got SpaceFinder set up and running, if you start from that day forward . . . it?s a phenomenal profit-maker. It?s the most profitable enterprise in the whole history of the Web,' Lenehan said. 'Or, we could think of all the development time and ... the high-priced executive time that went into cooking the thing up and executing it all and say, at this pace, we?ll break even in 2006.'

The Reader got into cyberspace to hedge against losing money. For that publication, jumping on the new-fangled Internet was a 'defensive posture.' (The main competition online is probably MetroMix, a Tribune publication that also features online listings and appeals to a similar demographic.)

Says Lenehan: 'We?re not trying to conquer new worlds, we?re not trying to get into new lines of business, we?re just trying to make sure somebody doesn?t eat our lunch.' Levine also publishes Washington?s City Paper. Besides its Web-based music columns and chat room, also a defensive move, the site uses the same 'E-Stamps' as the Reader. Here?s how they work: Browsing the online personals ads is a free service, but to answer an ad or send a message online, one needs to use an 'E-stamp,' which costs $2.

CP sells only a few hundred bucks worth of E-stamps a week, maybe $25,000 a year, according to Levine, but it?s an important niche. Just several years ago, the classified phone users responding to the personals brought in thousands of dollars in weekly revenue for the alternative papers, maybe as much as a million dollars annually for bigger publications. But Web-based personals and chat rooms are co-opting classified phone numbers, Levine said. The result has been that revenue from classified telephone lines has nose-dived, down perhaps by half in the past two years.

The right trends?

The oldest weekly paper and probably the most famous is the New York City?s Village Voice, founded in 1955. Its printed copies run out every week, said Greg Goff, the paper?s executive vice president of strategic planning. 'The Web allows us to expand our reach to additional readers,' he said.

It?s fitting that the patriarch of alternative newsweeklies has one of the snazziest sites. Unlike the spare Reader, villagevoice.com prominently displays its stories and columns with panache, including flash applications like rotating photos from its current week?s feature stories.

Like other weeklies, the Voice?s online competition is from Net natives that also offer listings, sites like the aforementioned Citysearch and AOL's Digital Cities, said Goff. The Voice site offers searchable classifieds and a host of listings.

Perhaps the real genius of the site is the 'VOICEm@il' feature. 'Get tomorrow?s ads today!' promises an online button for the feature, which allows viewers to see classifieds they?re interested in before the ads hit the street in the print edition.

Essentially, this is a leg up on other desperate apartment-hunters in New York?s crowded, crazy competition for living space. Viewers must pay a fee ranging from $7 to $10 a week for the e-mail notification service, depending on how many weeks they subscribe ($10 for one week, down to $7 a week for four or more). Goff wouldn?t dilvuge exact numbers of subscribers and income, saying only there are 'thousands, not hundreds, and not hundreds of thousands.'

Some basic calculations show the VOICEm@il feature is likely to be bringing in buckets of money. Supposing that Goff?s 'thousands' equals a conservative 2,000 subscribers, and that those subscribers are evenly divided over one-, two-, three- and four-week subscriptions, the VOICEm@il service lands the Voice $17,000 a week, or about $800,000 annually. The actual figure may be much higher.

'It pretty much covers its bills,' he said. 'It?s not a huge money-making operation for us yet, but all the trends are in the right direction.'

Finding the numbers

How many of these online successes can be emulated by other publications? Maybe not many in a cut-and-paste sense. Probably not many people outside Manhattan are willing to pay $10 to see classifieds the minute they?re available. But the idea of expanding one?s online publication with specialized services may have universal applications. Newspapers might do better to abandon the subscription impulse that repels Netizens and figure out instead how to provide value-added classified services that attract them.

'You need to think about the strengths of your paper in your market, and then do the thing that takes advantage of your strengths,' advised Levine. Perhaps Phoenix has a hot market for used car classifieds, for example, where advertisers wouldn?t balk at paying an extra $4 per ad, coupled with a 'CarFinder' feature. Or maybe Miami singles would shell out a few dollars to lock out competitors from responding to a personal ad that caught their eye ? a $10 head-start in calling the ad?s hot blonde. What the Voice, the Reader and others have shown is that providing an online service to a steady volume of customers can pay the bills.

'Anything you can multiply by 52 weeks,' said Levine, 'that has to be a big number.'