As the death toll in the American newspaper industry mounted this month, the German publisher Axel Springer, which owns Bild, the biggest newspaper in Europe, reported the highest annual profit in its 62-year history.

At Springer’s headquarters in Berlin, there has been no desperate talk of how to survive the recession and the digital revolution, the daily preoccupation of many U.S. publishers. Instead, Mathias Döpfner, Springer’s chief executive, said he was looking for opportunities to expand, scouting around for acquisition targets in Germany, Eastern Europe and maybe — in what would be a first for the company — the United States.

“I don’t believe in the end of the world; I don’t believe in the end of journalism,” Mr. Döpfner said. “On the contrary, I think the crisis can have a positive impact. The number of players will diminish, but the strong players may be stabler after the crisis.”

Viewed from Europe, “there is a certain irony” in the plight of the U.S. newspaper industry, he said: America created the companies that dominate the Internet globally, yet its newspaper companies have struggled to adapt to the technology. Perhaps because there is no homegrown European equivalent to Google, Amazon or eBay, he added, “there has been more pressure on European publishers to change in a more progressive way.”

Around the world, American newspapers are often held up as the gold standard of quality journalism. But now that the business of American newspapers has tarnished, could those papers learn a thing or two from their European counterparts?

Perhaps so. In Europe, some publishers — not just financial newspapers like The Wall Street Journal — have figured out how to raise money from their readers, reducing their reliance on fickle advertisers. Others have created successful new Web sites from scratch, giving their Internet divisions the heft that many American newspaper publishers’ online units lack. And still others have taken maverick approaches to competing with the likes of Google, which in many countries mops up more online ad revenue than all newspapers combined.

Thoroughgoing article. Worth reading.

Though, I approached it with some trepidation. You’re seeing this article appearing in the Online Global Edition of the New York Times – instead of where I originally bookmarked it – the online edition of the International Herald Tribune.

I have read the IHT for as long as I have read the Times. I’ve always considered it a better paper – especially before it was purchased by the Times.

We’ll see what happens. It as, after all, part of the process discussed in this article.