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WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. (AP) The newspaper industry's future is bright, if it acknowledges that "ink on paper" is in permanent decline and broadens its vision to include multiple methods of delivery, several newspaper executives said Monday. Without that acknowledgment, they said, the picture is dimmer.

"If we acknowledge that the core business is in decline, and put our efforts in the non-core business, we're going to be fine," said William Dean Singleton, vice chairman and chief executive officer of MediaNews Group Inc., a Denver-based company which operates 40 newspapers in nine states. "If we sit around and wait for the economy to recover, those people are going to die."

"The reality that we have to understand and to believe is that our core print product, that has been the bell cow all of our lives, is in decline and it's going to continue to be in decline," Singleton said. "If we are able to replace that with niche products, and niche product revenues, and online revenue continues to grow at the rate it's growing today, we're still going to have a fabulous business."

Singleton said the newspaper industry must define itself as "providing information to our communities and selling eyeballs to our advertisers."

Donna Barrett, chief operating officer of Newspaper Holdings Inc. in Birmingham, Ala., relayed the frustration of her 12-year-old son, who, trying to find some sport scores in a newspaper, said, "They're just so hard to use!"

The newspaper executives discussed the industry's future Monday during the annual Southern Newspaper Publishers Association convention at The Greenbrier resort.

Statistics from the Pew Internet & American Life Project show that about 68 percent of American adults go online each day, with 27 percent of them using the Internet to get news, trailing only e-mail and "searching" as activities. The Pew research shows that online use is higher among younger people, a group that newspapers struggle to reach; it is also higher among people with more money.

Meanwhile, since 1985, daily newspaper circulation has declined from 62.8 million to 55.2 million last year, according to the Newspaper Association of America. The percentage of adults who read newspapers has dropped from 77.6 percent in 1970 to 54.1 percent.

While saying "ink on paper is going to generate most of the revenue and most of the profits for a long, long, long, time," David Paxton, president and chief executive of Paxton Media Group in Paducah, Ky., said, "the reality that we all have to face is that the long-term decline in circulation is probably not going to change. There's simply too much competition for our readers.

"The response to that has to be to focus on our brand," Paxton said.

J. Stewart Bryan III, chairman and chief executive of Media General Inc. in Richmond, Va., agreed, and told his fellow publishers, "our future has to be trying to broaden the distribution of the local information that we put out to people, and by broadening it, I mean multimedia."

"We have to be providers of news and information to people in any form that they want it, whether it's wireless, internet, print or broadcast," Bryan said.

Walter E. Hussman, president of WEHCO Media Inc. in Little Rock, Ark., also cautioned that newspapers need to provide different kinds of stories to go along with the e-mail, pager and Internet versions. "The next day's coverage needs to be a lot longer on context than just reporting the event," he said.

Barrett championed the work of the Readership Institute at Northwestern University's Media Management Center as a way for newspapers to not only gain readers, but their trust as well in the wake of recent scandals both in newsrooms and over circulation numbers.

The institute's studies list imperatives for improving readership, and "it's just what the doctor ordered," Barrett said.