Palo Alto Weekly Publisher Bill Johnson said Monday that four or five years from now his newspaper and others in his chain might drop their print editions and only appear online. Other papers his company owns include The Almanac (Menlo Park), Mountain View Voice, Pleasanton Weekly, Danville Weekly and Pacific Sun (San Rafael).

The Palo Alto Weekly, which had been printing two editions a week, dropped its Wednesday edition in September and now only comes out on Fridays.

In a speech before the Palo Alto Rotary Club, Johnson said he sees the Internet as the future provider for most news. Johnson spoke about the decline in newspaper readership around the country and the economic downturns most newspapers were facing.

He said the Weekly gets $500,000 in revenue from its Web site per year, and its new daily e-mail report, which was introduced when it dropped its Wednesday edition, makes $3,000 a week so far.

Palo Alto Weekly was the first newspaper in the United States to publish its entire contents on the Web in 1994.