Don't mistake the weather for climate.
The newspaper industry is in the middle of a hurricane that's hitting
all businesses. When car dealers quit advertising, when businesses quit
hiring, when real estate tanks, when retailers scale back, of course
newspapers are going to be hurt.
Because of the high fixed costs of debt service, news companies respond
by channeling that hurt to the major variable costs: newsprint and
labor. So you get broadsheet newspapers that are ten inches wide,
weak-day editions disappearing, and copy editors working as Walmart
greeters.
Like the weather, the economy's effects are inconsistent. Some markets
are more stable than others. So it's possible to point today to
individual newspapers that are doing quite well, even though their
ownership may be in crisis.
Like a hurricane, the global economic crisis will end. In its wake there
will be a profitable business for many surviving newspapers. People who
proclaim the imminent end of print are overstating the case (and
peddling their books/consulting/speechmaking).
But in the background there is climate change: the long downward march
of print readership, the constant emergence of new competitors, the
disappearance of the scarcity on which newspapers evolved. There is time
to respond, to reshape into businesses that are designed for the coming
climate, but many won't. We all tend to have short attention spans, and
too many of us believe our own spin.