Rivals seek to harness digital advertising

To save itself from an uncertain fate, the US newspaper industry has formed two consortiums with overlapping membership to boost digital revenue, recalling an ill-fated effort more than 10 years ago. Launched at the end of the last millennium, the New Century Network was considered cutting edge for its time - a massive publishing consortium of nine top US newspapers contributing their editorial firepower to an Internet portal that aimed to take down the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft. Internal disagreements and a feeling among members that they could do better on their own ended the project in 1998, three years after its glitzy debut. More than 10 years later, top papers are collaborating again in an attempt to increase revenues from the Internet. What has changed, though, is a greater desperation and thus greater willingness to cede control.