For those of us who cherish the habit of a printed newspaper over coffee each morning, the gloomy harbingers are mounting: the Web-only reconfiguration or total collapse in the United States of hoary nameplates like The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Rocky Mountain News; the $800 million bailout for French newspapers proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy in February; and layoffs and page consolidations at papers everywhere — including at my employer, The New York Times.

Says Paul Gillin, the operator of the Web site Newspaper Death Watch (itself a potent sign of things): In an electronically mediated world, where frictionless access to information is the norm, “the high fixed cost of print publishing makes the major metro newspaper business model unsustainable.”

Insiders and armchair analysts might quibble over the real root of the industry’s woes, but a move last week by Marriott International, the global hotel and resort chain, suggested that, in an increasingly carbon-conscious world, newspapers have another sort of sustainability to worry about.

The hotelier announced that it would no longer deliver newspapers automatically to the doors of its guests — a ritual it has observed since first securing a deal with the Gannett newspaper chain, publisher of USA Today, 25 years ago.