"Three years from now, traditional newspapers are going to face an obvious profit squeeze,'' Intel Corp. chairman Andy Grove told the American Society of Newspaper Editors at its 1999 convention in San Francisco.

"You will know it when it's almost too late,'' said Grove.

Traditional newspaper content has shifted in recent years to Internet sources that deliver information as it breaks rather than waiting for the morning or afternoon edition.

"I don't know anybody who picks up the newspaper anymore to get a stock price or to see which team won a game,'' said Lawrence Kramer, founder of CBS-MarketWatch.com, a leading Internet financial news provider.

New York-based research firm Jupiter Communications found last year that 16 percent of online users had reduced their newspaper reading time to use the Web.

High-tech leaders told the editors they are going to have to move their content onto the Internet, make those stories interactive, and improve in-depth coverage in their print versions.

"I think you have to realize that the Internet is a whole new medium, not an extension of what you have been doing,'' said Cox Interactive Media vice president Hilary Goodall.

Goodall said Internet users like to respond to news stories, participate in virtual discussion groups and personalize news to their interests.

San Jose Mercury News executive editor Jerome Ceppos, whose Silicon Valley-based newspaper has invested heavily in a widely used, interactive Web site, said newspaper leaders are trying to keep up with "the collision of newspapers and technology.''

Still, these changes won't be cheap, said Christian Hendricks, president of Nando Media, an Internet news provider.

"Publishers simply need to allocate more money to cover the news,'' he said.

The majority of the more than 500 newspaper executives attending the conference agreed, in a show of hands, that they can't afford not to prepare for the changes the Internet will bring. © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

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