Back in the mid-1990s, as the Internet was beginning to change communication as we then knew it, many in the newspaper industry shuddered to think of how it might affect their profession.

Previously, when radio and television entered the news business, similar fears were raised of how broadcast would threaten the dominant news medium. While it did struggle, the newspaper business managed to survive broadcast's success, in part because each product served different kinds of audiences.

Internet news products, however, have the potential to satisfy both needs, as they can offer the immediacy of broadcast and the depth of the newspaper. Add to that the increased interactivity and the on-demand functionality, and you have a very worthy competitor.

Despite its strengths, Web news products have not supplanted their print brethren, and as use of news Web sites grows, there has not been a precipitous fall in newspaper readership.

In 1964, about 80 percent of the public read the newspaper everyday, according to the National Newspaper Association. That number steadily declined to 58 percent in the mid-1990s, when newspapers and broadcasters began their Web operations. That figure has only seen some small dips and even some gains since then, even as Web viewership has shot through the stratosphere.

The numbers indicate that Internet news sites have not been cannibalizing the news organizations that spawned them and may indeed be helping bolster their relevance.

Much the way e-mail almost single-handedly resurrected what was becoming the lost art of letter writing, Web news is introducing a new generation to the benefits of staying on top of the issues in a way only a well-staffed, deep and diverse daily newspaper can.

For me, nowhere was this more evident than at a conference hosted recently in San Diego by the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Of the dozens of journalism students I spoke with, most of them expressed a passion to do the kind of work that newspapers do. And for many of them, the "newspaper" they were talking about was the electronic edition, not the paper version.

As the news business shakes out, the winners are going to be those organizations that appreciate that content is the foundation of any successful news vehicle and that the vehicle is just the means of conveyance. Properly married, traditional and new media foster each other's success, build each other's audiences and take readers to a whole new level of insight.

Andrew Kleske is online editor for the North County Times and president of the San Diego chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. E-mail him at kleske@nctimes.com.