The study coincides with the NAA's annual convention in Chicago. Top of mind for the publishers attending was the looming sale of 12 Knight Ridder Inc. newspapers by The McClatchy Co., which is acquiring the storied publishing company in a $4.5 billion deal that will reshape the landscape of American newspapers.

Strategies for coping with the rapid transformation of consumers' news consumption habits due to the Internet was also a big topic at the three-day conference, which began Sunday.

Andrew Swinand, executive vice president at Starcom Worldwide, a major advertising-buying agency, said during a panel discussion that newspapers could do more to harness their presence online, such as getting more participation from audiences.

Swinand also said his firm would like to buy advertising across newspaper Web sites but had difficulty doing so, and had to go through third-party vendors. He also said it was difficult to buy both print and online advertising through newspapers, and that the process for fulfilling newspaper ad sales was cumbersome and less automated than in other media.

Swinand did say afterward that he was still "bullish" on newspapers' online advertising potential, but added that newspapers should do more to personalize and localize their online content, in ways such as the social networking site MySpace does.

In other topics, executives from The Sun in Baltimore, the head of news at E.W. Scripps Co. and the head of online media at McClatchy discussed another big pending issue for newspapers: how to integrate print and online news operations.

Having new people come in with fresh ideas was key for newspapers as they develop their online operations said Mark Contreras, Scripps' vice president of news operations. Those people are likely to devise new initiatives over the next few years that will "save our bacon," he said.

Zhang reported that, according to his internal research, Chinese Internet users numbered over 150 million--and possibly up to 200 million--and Sohu.com, including all of their properties, was in the top five most trafficked sites in the world. Nielsen NetRatings, which doesn't have statistics for China, reports that the U.S. had 154 million active users in January 2006. This means that China, if Zhang is correct, is at or above the U.S. in the number of Internet users and that these users stay connected far longer each time.

How could the milestone of China surpassing the U.S. in Internet users have gone so unremarked? It turns out that it isn't that easy collecting data on over a billion people in a country as vast as China, where most people are not connected by phone lines.

The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) reports that the number of active Chinese Internet users was 111 million by Dec. 31, 2005, up from 94 million a year earlier. And over the past two years, it has been growing at a steady rate of 18%. However, according to Zhang, the CNNIC polling is conducted by calling fixed line phones. "Young people do not use fixed line phones. They all have mobile phones," Zhang said, explaining why he believes the CNNIC is reporting lower-than-accurate numbers.

Even if we assume that China is still behind the U.S. in terms of users, China definitely wins in another critical area. One of the most valued metrics of Internet usage (especially for advertisers) is time spent online. Chinese users average 15.9 hours per week, while Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ), the most popular Internet site in the U.S., can only get its users to stick around for less than one hour per week (216.5 minutes per month according to ComScore Media Metrix). That's 1.765 billion hours per week online in China, compared with 129 million hours per week online in the U.S.

What's up with all that time online? This is the first time in Chinese history that the nation has been connected. As Zhang explains, "People log onto the Internet and Sohu.com because, in China, there is no Forbes, Reuters or The Washington Post. Print media was all state-controlled and official, and the Internet filled this void." Indeed, according to the CNNIC, 67.9% of online use in China is spent devouring news, more than searching (65.7%) and e-mailing (64.7%). By contrast, only 3% of Yahoo!'s U.S. traffic clicks over to news.*

Moreover, China has a lot more room to grow than the U.S. While roughly half of the U.S. population is actively using the Internet, just 11.7% of the Chinese population is currently plugged in. [...]