ATLANTA - Print classified advertising may be rising again and online revenues may be soaring, but newspapers and their Web sites face a “perfect storm” during the months and years ahead - and they aren’t responding fast enough or smart enough, according to Chris Schroeder, vice president of strategy for The Washington Post Co.

Schroeder, the kickoff speaker at May’s Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show sponsored by Editor & Publisher, warned that the news audience is changing. Now that newspapers’ interactive media operations are profitable and growing, they are getting complacent, he said.

“As we succeed, we - not the newspapers, but we - risk going into a defensive crouch,” he said.

The perfect storm Schroeder described consists of four trends:

*Aggregators, like AOL, MSN and Yahoo!, taking audience from newspaper and other Web sites;

*Those that disaggregate that which had been aggregated, like Monster.com, ESPN.com, Autobytel.com, traffic and weather sites, and Craig’s List, “an amazing phenomenon.”

 *Those that aggregate that which was once disaggregated and now reaggregate it, like real estate site LendingTree.com, Ticketmaster.com, and Expedia and Orbitz in travel.

*Advertising optimizers and the pay-for-performance model.

All of these, he said, threaten newspapers and their Web sites like never before - but also provide great opportunity.

“There’s an ability now for us to go after somebody else’s legacy businesses for a change,” he said. “All of us should worry a little less about out-Googling Google.

Other notes and quotes from the two-day-plus program:

*NYTimes.com’s real estate service won an Eppy Award for best Internet classified service with more than 1 million monthly visitors. CareerJournal.com, from The Wall Street Journal, won the award for best real estate service with fewer than 1 million monthly visitors.

On that one, we might have thrown CareerJournal out of the mix. There’s no easy measure of which sites and companies should be considered for “large” awards and which should be considered for “small” awards, but the Journal clearly has large-market resources and capabilities in the employment field, and oughtn’t be competing against smaller sites. (But, so too does BostonWorks.com.) Maybe there’s a better way to measure? Cut off at a half-million monthly visitors instead? Or even lower? Whichever, if you’re looking for best-practices sites, start with the above.

Some people still don’t get it. David Carlson is a distinguished new media professor at the University of Florida, a smart guy and a good friend.

But his comments on the Poynter interactive-media Weblog made us wince: “A glance at the schedule of events at the E&P Interactive conference going on this week in Atlanta might lead one to think that content is not an important part of media Web sites,” he wrote. “Out of 12 educational sessions over two days, there are three - count them, three - sessions I would classify as specifically related to online content.

“The rest are about advertising, site registration, targeting and the like. I certainly understand that sites will not continue to exist unless they can pay the bills, but with a conference bill filled with sessions such as ‘What consumers demand from classifieds today and how your site can give it to them’ and ‘Cross platform buying and selling/integrated marketing,’ I fear that some of us may be losing sight of what brings people to media Web sites in the first place. It’s content, and there is a reason people say ‘Content is king.’ You can’t ‘monetize’ visitors you don’t have.”

Oh, please. When 25 percent to 40 percent of all visitors to newspaper Web sites are visiting for the classified categories of automotive, employment, real estate, merchandise/auctions and personal, you’ve got to remember that classifieds are content: in many cases, more than nifty-but-widely-ignored Flash-animated stories.

I understand that what makes newspapers unique and gives them the opportunity to succeed online better than any of their dot-com counterparts is local-local-local content - rich, deep understanding of their communities better than Monster.com, AutoTrader.com or Realtor.com could ever offer. With local editorial content and advertising content better than anyone else offers. Too many skimp in that area. But please, don’t let anyone be fooled into thinking that only editorial news coverage is “content.”

*Most frightening thing at the conference: Only a handful of people under 40. Most of us were FOWMs - fat old white males (and as a FOWM myself, I’m allowed that characterization). The median age was probably mid-40s. Ouch. Attendance by women was pretty decent (but few women spoke); to say minorities were underrepresented would be charitable. C’mon, newspapers: Don’t you have anyone under 30 in the interactive-media department who’d be worth sending to a program like this? (And note to sponsors: In addition to adding more women and minority representatives to the program, bust your butts to find several good speakers who are under 40, preferably under 30. They’re out there.) We’d say they ought to offer an under-40 discount, and maybe even a larger one for under 30s, but that probably wouldn’t be legal. Smart, but not legal.

*Wes Jackson of Belo Interactive, who along with Alison Scholly of the Chicago Tribune gave a terrific presentation on audience measurement and the usage of registration as an advertising sales tool: “When I start looking at the data we collect about our audience, [I] start wondering if George Orwell just missed 1984 by a decade or two.”

The Atlanta meeting was the 15th annual get-together by interactive media enthusiasts. The conference is clearly on the rebound, but still has a long way to go. A few years back the show was the highlight of the year, a gotta-be-there event that turned in more than $1 million a year in profits for E&P and its parent, VNU. But the dot-com bust and some really bad moves ran the conference into the ground. This year’s was a step up from last year’s, attendees told us, and was certainly leaps and bounds better than the 2002 debacle. But still, the exhibit hall was pretty thin - 25 exhibitors - and attendance was anemic.

Conference organizers said the meeting drew about 250 attendees, but that probably meant only about 150 (or fewer) with paid badges. Many on the attendee list were exhibitors (paid, but sort-of); contest judges, speakers and other comps.

That said, if a program can help resurrect a conference, this one probably did: Almost all excellent speakers, with very few clunkers. It’s rare to review two solid days of sessions and say to yourself, “I can’t really afford to miss a single one.” Kudos to Matt Pollack of VNU and his team for the program.

Peter M. Zollman is founding principal of Classified Intelligence LLC and the Advanced Interactive Media Group LLC. He covered the conference for Newspapers & Technology. He can be reached at 407.788.2780 or via e-mail at  pzollman@aimgroup.com.