One of the biggest concerns that newspapers new to the web have is advertising rates. For so long they have been honing their print advertising rates, that they have become experts in the field. When it comes to the web, though, confusion ensues.

Being web savvy, most people understand that websites have statistic programs that show website owners all sorts of information about their site: number of visitors, where they come from, how they found the site, how long they were there, etc. etc.

Statistics are great. But like anything else, they should not be overdone when it comes to deciding your web advertising rates. The old saying, just because your can, doesn't mean you should comes to play here.

Yes, you can probably figure out which advertiser is getting the most hits from your website. You can probably find out how many clicks that advertiser is getting per day. But this should not be used when marketing your site to advertisers.

First let me welcome you to this website. As you can see, this is the first blog entry for the site, which I am writing about 24 hours before the official launch of the site. Needless to say, myself and the team here at Maine Web FX are excited for the launch, which we hope will in some small well help the newspaper industry come to full stride on the web.

But the question we keep getting from people (in regard to the launch) is, "why newspapers?"

It's true that we have a web design firm that runs the gamut for design and programming already. The firm does everything from e-commerce to real estate. But our passion has always been newspapers.

Starting out as a reporter at the Brattleboro Reformer in Vermont, I had my share of great stories to cover. When the excitement waned, I moved to Phoenix, where I worked for a weekly newspaper covering cops and crime before working at a daily ... covering much of the same.

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News audiences are ditching television and newspapers and using the Internet as their main source of information, in a trend that could eventually see the demise of local papers, according to a new study Wednesday.

"As online use has increased, the audiences of older media have declined," Harvard University professor Thomas Patterson said in a report on the year-long study issued by Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

"In the past year alone... newspaper circulation has fallen by three percent, broadcast news has lost a million viewers," said the study, entitled "Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look and News on the Internet."

Meanwhile, the numbers of people using the Internet as a news source have increased -- exponentially, in some cases.

Traffic to websites that post news produced by a third source, including search engines and service providers, aggregators, such as topix.net or digg.com, which use software to monitor and post web content; and blogs -- increased across the board between April 2006 and the same month in 2007.