"Overall newspaper audience is a growth story as opposed to one of inexorable decline," says Gary Meo, senior vice president of print and internet services for Scarborough Research. "Their web sites are reaching younger, affluent people, and that’s good news for newspapers."

It also makes sense because the combined print and online more accurately reflects a newspaper's actual penetration in community, which is what advertisers are really buying. In that sense, whether the paper is read in print or online ought to make little difference. And in the best of all worlds it ought to work to an advantage, allowing advertisers options they didn't have in the pre-internet years.

But actually selling that dual audience to advertisers is a lot tougher.

Newspapers have to fully integrate ad programs as they merge their print and online operations. As it is now, papers sell the two media separately.

But advertisers also have to buy into this notion of a combined audience, and that's a tough sell when print circulation has been the measure longer than anyone's memory.

"The newspaper industry is trying to make a big push to have readership or audience accepted and utilized as a metric for evaluating newspapers the way all other media does," Meo says. "It’s a different way of looking at newspapers. Newspapers have always been treated differently because of the circulation metric."

There's no doubt among newspaper people that the old metric is outdated. Penetration, defined as households divided by circulation based on audited circulation reports and the U.S. Census, actually peaked almost a century ago, in 1922. That's even before the age of radio.

In 1950, 123 percent of households bought a newspaper, meaning 1.23 papers were sold per household. By 1961, that number was down to 80 percent. In 1990, that number had dropped to 67 percent. By 2000, only 53 percent of households were buying a newspaper, and today that number is around 51 percent.

But the other problem newspapers face is coming up with a metric to replace circulation that combines print and online readership in a manner that advertisers can understand and work with.

That raises fundamental questions. Is the online visitor of the same value as the print reader?

One approach has been to weight a month of web traffic to a week's worth of print circulation, according to Philip Meyer, the Knight chair of Journalism at the University of North Carolina and author of "The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age."

But Meyer sees this as an apple-and-oranges formula. "I don't see any logical reason to do it that way."

Meo agrees that comparing the past seven days in print to the past 30-day internet traffic is goofy. "You wouldn’t do that with any other media," he says. "We think comparing the past seven days' print audience to the past seven days internet audience makes sense."

Whatever the formula, it will have to build wide acceptance among industry leaders--publishers and advertisers and their agencies--with all the bugs worked out, before it can be implemented.

To that end an industry group has been formed, the Media Measurement Integration Task Force, charged with coming up with global standards for combined print and digital readerships. It meets again in June.

For all the setbacks newspapers have faced in recent years, Meo points out that they are still the dominant local medium. The challenge is in selling those audiences as one, including those sought-after younger web site visitors. Says Meo: "It’s the way newspapers are attracting younger readers who have grown up in the digital age."