New York Times reporter Richard Perez-Pena picked up on an interesting comment made on a conference call today featuring newspaper executives and various other folks talking about new ways of counting newspaper circulation. (They’d like to count these new ways because they tend to look quite good, while traditional ways of counting it — print circulation copies that you pay for — are doing poorly)

Perez-Pena, The Wall Street Journal’s Sarah Ellison, I and a few other reporters dug in during the question-and-answer session, asking questions that more or less centered on whether new, Audit Bureau of Circulations-certified Web numbers would really make a huge difference to advertisers who already seem less than enchanted with the newspaper business these days.

Here’s the comment as it appeared in Perez-Pena’s story: 

Newspaper industry executives said they hoped that the new set of numbers would put a more positive cast on newspapers’ prospects than the routinely gloomy paid circulation reports have done.

“We do feel that there’s a story that’s been missed here,” said Stephen P. Hills, president and general manager of The Washington Post. There is good news about newspaper readership, he said, “but you wouldn’t know that to read the newspapers.”

What could that good news be? Perez-Pena explains:

An analysis of 88 major papers showed that in the last two years, about half of them had seen no change in readership or had registered an increase, said Bob Cohen, president and chief executive officer of Scarborough.

The industry is also hopeful that the new readership figures will make an impression on advertisers, who have broken with historical patterns by retreating from newspapers despite an expanding economy. Executives noted that newspaper Web sites - unlike their print counterparts - draw a lot of young adults, who are desirable among advertisers.

But advertisers have generally not considered an online reader to be as valuable as a print reader, so it remains to be seen what effect the revised numbers will have.

(Photo: Reuters Archive — Journalists use a column printer to send copy to newspapers)