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Your newspaper has been brought into one of the fiercest turf battles out there. It is under attack from multiple angles. Your readership is falling; along with it, your advertisers are dropping like flies.

Is this the end of the newspaper industry as you know it? Will print editions succumb to the web? Is there nothing to be done about it?

Before you hammer in the last nail to that coffin, here are ways your newspaper can embrace the web. Use it, profit from it and expand your readership and advertising revenue further than you ever thought possible.

The problems that newspapers throughout the United States are facing are very real, but not lost battles unless you go about the issue from a "print only" point of view. If publishers and editors face the problem of declining readership, loss of ad revenue and turf wars on the Internet head on by embracing the new medium, they can accomplish bigger circulations and ad revenue than ever thought possible right within their own markets.

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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.