Steve Yelvington put the Minneapolis Star Tribune online in 1994. He became executive editor of Cox Interactive Media in 1999, and today he is vice president of strategy and content for the interactive division of Morris Newspapers, whose newspaper Web sites have won more awards than any other newspaper chain in America. In 2001, the Newspaper Association of America presented him with its New Media Pioneer Award.

Yelvington is direct and incisive about why most newspapers' online editions are still dependent on the print side.

"We're not succeeding as much as we should for two reasons. One is that we're way too satisfied with our year-to-year growth in traffic and revenue," he said. "We need to look at that traffic and revenue in a broader context and understand how small the numbers really are, and how much they need to grow.

"The other is that we're not squarely facing the problems of the newspaper industry and asking ourselves: What do we need to do differently? The newspaper industry is much less in denial than it was a decade ago, but we're not making bold changes in our products. We're just making little adjustments, and they're not enough."

Yelvington thinks the world has changed but the newspaper industry's concept of a newspaper has failed to change with it.

"Newspapers are suffering from changes in the environment. It's not that print is under attack by other media. It's that the competitive landscape, the array of media choices, and the availability of information has so radically changed that the content package offered by newspapers is becoming obsolete.

"Moving the same content package from print to Internet isn't a solution," he said. "If people are wandering away from it when it's in print, why would we think they'll bond with it on the Web?"

Yelvington said that the industry needs to rethink what roles newspapers and their Web sites can play in people's lives in the 21st century, and what content and services that newspaper ought to provide.

"And we need to consider our Web sites as separate, complementary products, not just as Web editions," he said.

"In fact, the single smartest move we could make would be to ban the term 'online newspaper' from our vocabularies."

Yelvington said the core franchise of any American newspaper is local life. "The Web offers us many opportunities to provide useful, unique local services, but by and large we have failed to step up to that challenge.

"We build our sites around collections of stories instead of useful databases. Where we have useful, actionable information -- such as what movie to see tonight at the local theater -- we hide it three links deep because it's not news," he said. "If someone wants to buy a mattress, or get restaurant recommendations, or find a plumber, our sites tend to be poor sources of help."

"If you look at what people really do on the Internet -- and there's plenty of data -- you'll find that most of it simply isn't supported on our Web sites. It should not be surprising that our habituation rates are so low.

"We're just not where it's happening. And we need to fix that."