Pruitt gave the keynote address at the Borrell Associates Local Online Advertising Conference in New York City.

Pruitt is also OK with aggregators like Google and Yahoo, because they send plenty of traffic — 20 percent, he said — to McClatchy newspapers’ sites.

“In fact, McClatchy credits its success in building online revenue to its alignments with several different Internet players including Yahoo, Cars.com and CareerBuilder,” E&P says. “Pruitt told the Borrell conference that online revenue in 2009 accounted for 16 percent of total revenue — up from 11 percent in 2008.”

“We are very comfortable with free content supported by advertising,” Pruitt said. “We don’t view it as fatally flawed. That said, if we could make ad revenue with paid products we would.”