The war in Iraq is all but over, but the conflict took its toll on newspaper publishers’ bottom lines.

Dow Jones & Co., issuing its first-quarter results April 10, said earnings fell almost 50 percent, citing in part the war’s effect on ad revenues.

Dow Jones said it earned 82 cents per share for the three months ended March 31, down from the $1.53 per share a year ago.

“We continue to be hampered by the persistently difficult business and advertising environment,” said Peter R. Kann, Dow Jones’ chairman and CEO, in a statement. The company’s core ad segments — finance and technology — have been particularly clobbered by uncertain economic conditions surrounding the war, he added.

Dow Jones’ lament is echoed by other newspaper publishers including Pulitzer Inc., Knight-Ridder and Gannett Co. Inc., all of whom reassessed their first-quarter earnings.

Some bright spots did emerge. Tribune Co. posted a first-quarter profit of $141.2 million, or 41 cents per share.

That’s well within what analysts expected from the Chicago-based publisher. The company said first-quarter results were helped by double-digit sales gains from its broadcast unit. Its newspapers kicked in $974 million in sales, an uptick of 2 percent.

McClatchy Co. also reported increased quarterly earnings, but said it couldn’t anticipate how much the Iraqi war might affect future ad revenues. For the first quarter, the company earned $25 million, or 55 cents per share, thanks to higher advertising and circulation revenues.

Gannett also posted slightly higher earnings, but said the war had trimmed demand for advertising.

“The quarter started out strong, but results, particularly at our television stations and USA Today, were depressed by the reluctance of advertisers to spend in an uncertain geopolitical environment,” Gannett Chairman Douglas McCorkindale said in a prepared statement.

Knight Ridder, meanwhile, said earnings would have fallen 2 percent if not for a significant accounting charge related to its investment in CareerBuilder. Accommodating the writedown enabled the publisher to post a profit of $50.7 million, or 60 cents per share.

Yet Knight Ridder Chairman Tony Ridder warned it would be difficult to predict second-quarter performance.

“Uncertainty before the war in Iraq, and then the war, negatively affected results for the quarter,” he said. “Total advertising revenue was up 1.9 percent in January and 1.1 percent in February but down 2.3 percent in March.”

Although the war has informally ended, analysts say the industry better get used to a roller coaster market.

“In contrast to mostly positive surprises when fourth-quarter results, we have some concern that there will be negative surprises this time around,” said Merrill Lynch publishing analyst Lauren Rich Fine in a report she issued about newspaper stocks in early April.

War worries, she wrote, are leading companies to throttle back already anemic hiring plans, further depressing help-wanted lineage. While preprints have held steady, retail ad volume has been more “volatile,” Fine said, again reflecting the war’s onset.

As a result, Fine predicted ad revenues to rise only 2 percent to 2.5 percent in the first quarter, following 4.5 percent growth in the fourth quarter.

She forecast a similar drop in earnings per share, predicting EPS growth of 13 percent in the first quarter, down from the 20-percent to 25-percent increase originally anticipated.

The market will remain fluid, Fine and other analysts say, until the economy gains steam and consumers and businesses believe the United States’ involvement in Iraq has stabilized. Until then, market watchers say, all bets are off.