WASHINGTON — Suppliers wondering where all the Nexpo convention-floor traffic went and whether capital improvement budgets were a thing of the past took the opportunity to vent their concerns to a group of top publishing executives.

Session moderator Dennis Nierman, president of alfaQuest Technologies Inc., discussed the financial challenges vendors are facing and also told the panel that it’s getting increasingly difficult to justify Nexpo attendance especially if publishers don’t agree to send people to the show.

The publishers on the panel, George Irish, president of Hearst’s newspaper division; William Dean Singleton, vice chairman and chief executive officer of MediaNews Group Inc.; Gary Pruitt, chief executive of McClatchy Co.; and Michael Reed, president and chief executive of GateHouse Media Inc., said they hadn’t taken any steps to restrict the attendance of their key production executives.

“We didn’t encourage or discourage attendance,” Irish said, arguing that Hearst, at least, has invested in its newspaper operations, citing the more than $250 million the publisher is spending on a new press for the Times Union in Albany, N.Y., and significant upgrades at the Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle and other properties.

“At the Chronicle, we dealt with 45 different vendors that didn’t even exist five years ago,” he said.

Reed, meantime, said GateHouse sent the publisher’s six top decision-makers. “Even though we have more than 100 newspapers, that doesn’t mean we have 100 decision-makers.”

Precisely the point

And that centralized approach is precisely the point that partly explains dwindling Nexpo attendance, vendors on the floor said. Vendors also cited such groups as Lee Enterprises, Journal Register Co. and McClatchy as ones that seriously throttled back the number of production execs they sent to the show.

Suppliers also wondered about publishers’ intent to outsource additional operations, in the process shuttling the need to buy and upgrade equipment to companies based in India, The Philippines and other countries.

“Outsourcing is definitely something we are looking at,” said Reed. “We’re looking at printing, call centers and accounting services,” he said.

Singleton, whose MNG has farmed out advertising production at a number of its properties including the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, said, “The only way to make a responsible margin now is to be efficient, and that means more automation and fewer people. You can sell your equipment to us or you can have offices in India.”

But Singleton also said the industry continues to invest in many other areas, particularly online. Singleton repeated his goal that MNG reap 20 percent of its annual revenues from online operations by 2012.

“If we can get half of our operating cash flow from our online operations then Wall Street will love us,” he said. “By 2012 newspaper stocks will soar.”