The way advertising is presented in online newspaper sites is killing them.
Per Robert Niles at USC's Online Journalism Review:
News publishers like to point to television, free news online, English literacy rates and slew of other reasons to explain their readership losses. But the contempt that newspapers show for their readers by burying their editorial content beneath their remaining advertising surely is not helping keep readers around.
He provides examples of the garbage we're served up.
Everyday I check the website of the Pasadena Star-News. And every day, the front section of the website's homepage is obscured by a pop-up widget urging me to take a survey about the site's new design. Click the red 'X' in the corner to close the widget window, and the op-up appears every time you return to the page. (If you click the button declining to take the survey, the window disappears for the remainder of your session.)
If I register with the LA Times website, the Times insists on spamming me with commercial e-mails for products about which I do not care. If I opt-out of the e-mails, the Times cancels my website registration. (Which is why I don't have a Times website registration anymore…
And let's not forget the slew of pop-up, pop-under and screen take-over ads that accompany any visit to more newspaper websites than I am any longer able to count.
Doc Searls, my source on this post, highlights Niles' solution - getting content to the front.
...if news organizations are proud of their news content, why do so many insist on hiding it?
Readers owe you nothing. They have no responsibility as citizens to read your reporting, and no responsibility as consumers to look at your ads. The have the right, and ability, to go about their lives without ever once glancing at your publication.
If you want people to read your publication, you then need to do whatever is necessary to make them want to read it.
That means leading with your best shot.
By and large, legal publications whether they be from ALM, the ABA Journal, or others have not been too bad about throwing advertising in our faces when we click to their online sites. I hope as ALM's off line revenues start to slide that they can resist the temptation to launch sites with click through ads and registration.
The ABA Journal may not be as tempted as their online site is a start from scratch approach. It's not a regurgitation of the ABA Journal hard copy, where ALM's Law.com appears to be online publication of their print properties.
But I have had legal publications and legal bloggers call inquiring about building a website or blog with click through registration, pay to access, or click through pop up ads. No matter how shortsighted I tell them that is, they usually turn to another party who will do what they say, as opposed to offer wise counsel.
It's all about making your content relevant. That means making it easy to access without distraction.
Sure have ads, but don't be stupid about the way you present them. Look at what Google, Yahoo, and Newsvine have done. Ads and content can coexist.
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Well it's started in the legal journalism business with ALM's law.com. Noticed this week that Law.com was sending traffic to my blog from their Legal Technology Section. 
America Lawyer Media's 
