Robust growth in online-advertising sales offset a mild decline in print-ad revenue for Canadian papers last year, an industry trade group says.

Total 2007 revenue for the country's newspapers, including online operations, slipped 0.8 per cent to $3.6 billion, the Canadian Newspaper Association said yesterday.

Print-ad revenue fell 2.4 per cent, but online revenue increased 29 per cent compared with 2006.

"This is in sharp contrast to the U.S., where a contracting economy helped drive print-ad revenues to the biggest year-over-year fall in more than half a century," the association noted.

In the United States, print-advertising revenue fell 9.4 per cent last year to $42 billion, according to the Newspaper Association of America. It was the steepest drop since the industry group began keeping its tally in 1950. U.S. online-advertising growth was 18.8 per cent in 2007, down from 31.4 per cent in 2006.

"The real story is how well we are holding our own in an age of global media disruption," said Anne Kothawala, president of the Canadian Newspaper Association.

"The narrative about newspapers in the U.S. has been consistently negative in recent years, and that negativity has unduly influenced perceptions of the health of the newspaper industry in Canada." The Canadian Press

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