For more than 30 years, publicly owned newspaper companies have been getting together in early December for the Media and Telecom Week conference to tell their stories to investors and analysts.

The 2006 edition kicked off today.

A topic in the air, but unlikely to get much discussion from presenters, is just how much longer there will be enough public companies to compose a representative picture of the industry at this conference. Of course, Knight Ridder is no more. The Tribune Co. will be absent from the conferences this year as it considers how it might be sold or split up. And this coming year could be one in which a few more of the companies are sold or take themselves private.

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See Rick's coverage of last year's Media Week Conferences. He'll be there this week, as well. Check back for more from Rick later this week. In the meantime, check out the Media and Telecom Week conference link.

The sale this summer of the 12 Knight Ridder properties that the McClatchy Co. chose not to keep shifted, by my calculation, about 3.5 percent of the industry, by circulation, from public to private hands. A Tribune breakup could add another 6.5 percent. In smaller transactions, six of Dow Jones & Co. Inc.'s Ottaway newspapers have been sold, and seven of Journal Register's are on the block.

At this pace, the public company share of newspaper circulation, now at about 40 percent, could fall in a year or two to just a third or a quarter of the industry. Stock prices remain depressed for reasons that will be obvious as the companies present their results and 2007 prospects. Meanwhile, private equity firms and civic-minded billionaires, like Eli Broad (Los Angeles Times) and Jack Welch (The Boston Globe), are scouting deals.

Deutsche Bank Securities CIRCULATION FALLS: Estimated U.S. daily and Sunday circulation trends for the last 7 Audit Bureau of Circulations periods. This chart is reproduced, with permission, from "Newspaper Publishers: 2007" private company outlook, a report from Deutsche Bank (December 2006).

But even as the companies are beleaguered, expect their executives to talk about continued online growth and multi-year transitional strategies. There continue to be few positive things to say about print advertising. Market share in nearly every advertising category is slipping slowly away to Internet competitors -- look for real estate classifieds to weaken in 2007. And poor circulation performance is leaving the papers with little leverage if they try to increase rates.

In a conference call Friday, Lauren Rich Fine, with input from Merrill Lynch's key-industry analysts, estimated that advertising spending across the board will grow more than 2.5 percent in 2007. Fine is a newspaper analyst for Merrill Lynch and a member of Poynter's National Advisory Board. She said that, despite the overall increase in ad spending across industries, she is expecting newspaper companies' ad revenues to fall 1.5 percent.

Additionally, despite expected savings from job cuts and the decreased cost of newsprint, the companies are likely to experience another year of falling earnings per share. The two best performers, The Washington Post Co. and The E.W. Scripps Co., get the majority of their income from non-newspaper businesses -- the Post from Kaplan Education and Scripps from a group of cable networks.

MG Strategic Research AD REVENUE FALLS: Newspaper advertising revenue from January 2004 to October 2006. This chart is reproduced, with permission, from the 2007 Media Forecast, a report from John Morton and Miles Groves at MG Strategic Research (November 2006).

One old issue may get a fresh airing when investors and analysts pose their questions. If these highly profitable companies cannot produce growth, why not at least reward shareholders with a generous dividend? Little-known GateHouse Media Inc., a New England group of small dailies and weeklies, had a successful public stock offering this fall in large part by saying it hopes to pay a 7.5 percent dividend, notably higher than the 2 percent industry average.

Dividends used to be an important benefit of "yield" stocks such as banks and utilities, which issued fairly hefty periodic payments to shareholders. That approach went out of style in the go-go 1980s and 1990s, when companies tried instead to reward stockholders with growth of share price. Now dividends are coming back in fashion.

The conferences also present an opportunity to scout out competitors, collaborators and disruptors. Monster.com, Yahoo and industry-owned CareerBuilder, currently slugging it out for newspaper partners in classified job advertising, are all on the program. So is Craigslist, the Web site of free classifieds, a for-profit company despite its anti-establishment image -- though not one in which you can buy stock. Craigslist has been shaking San Francisco-area and other big city newspapers for some time. In 2006, it moved into markets such as Green Bay, Wis. and Athens, Ga.

Journalism rarely gets a lot of attention at these affairs, but look for Gannett to showcase its plans to convert traditional newsrooms into "information centers," with new emphasis on local databases and reader participation in story development. Perfect strategy or not, it is at least more of a strategy than most in the industry have been articulating.

In fact, Fine headlined her conference preview: "Lousy fundamentals; who cares?" Bad basics are not only a downer, they have become old news. Investors may be listening more now for a persuasive story about the long-term future, and how far newspaper companies have gone down the path to getting there.