The report’s authors diagnose problems for digital media. Perhaps chief among them is that advertising on the Web tends to have less value for the consumer than advertising in other formats.

“If you ever watch somebody reading a copy of Vanity Fair, they spend as much time looking at the ads as they spend looking at the content,” Mr. Grueskin said, “because the ads are actually useful for readers.” (Ads having value on their own, he added, is “something that we as journalists have a hard time getting our heads around.”)

One of Columbia’s case studies of advertising adding value is KSL.com, the Web site of KSL, the NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City. Thanks in large part to a robust classified ads service, the site now registers about 250 million page views each month — a staggeringly high figure for a local market of that size. Steep declines in classified advertising have affected countless newspapers and other news properties. But KSL.com has bucked the trend. Its classifieds section benefits from its ownership by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and from the fact that it started up before Craigslist in Salt Lake City.

But it also benefits, Mr. Grueskin said, by reflecting its community’s moral values and by forbidding anonymity. “If I were a publisher, I would spend some time looking at what KSL’s Web site does with classifieds versus what Craigslist does,” he said.

Mr. Grueskin said he was struck by a comment that Chris Hendricks, a vice president at McClatchy, made in an interview for the report:

"It’s almost like we are a sales and distribution company that decided we’re going to fund journalism." Mr. Hendricks’s local sales force sells space on sites like Yahoo as well as on McClatchy’s own sites.

The report’s authors assert that there are limits to the cost-per-thousand model of advertising pricing and say that news outlets and marketers together should “forge new models that integrate digital ads and social-media outreach.”