Classified ads, once the mainstay of newspaper advertising, are scarce—headed to Craigslist.com and other websites, where you can place your ad for free or for pennies. Other key advertising categories, notably auto and real estate, have also plummeted. Meanwhile, the price of newsprint is skyrocketing, despite declining demand.

Adding to what is essentially an advertising-driven calamity is the reality that though the U.S. population has more than doubled in the past 60 years, absolute newspaper circulation this year will be lower than in 1946. A younger generation wants its information online, and newspapers and magazines have obliged by, after first being too slow to embrace the Internet, giving their content away online for free. Content for which, I might add, they charge their traditional subscribers hefty sums in print. But even as other sites profit by aggregating and linking to their content, most newspaper websites themselves are austere, dull, and technologically backward, relying for revenue on the evaporating supply of low-cost help-wanted, real estate, and auto classifieds.

The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune are among those organizations that have spent many millions of dollars covering the Iraq War, with each outlet paying for multiple reporters, translators, full-time drivers, guards, bullet-proof armored cars, year-round office space, office managers, and security consultants with intelligence backgrounds to provide threat assessments. And all of them give that work away for free online.

A friend of mine who was at dinner with a top Times executive asked why the paper had stopped walling off and requiring paid subscriptions for some of its online content. One factor, the executive said, was that a prominent columnist had voiced chagrin about fewer people reading his work. My friend wonders why, if the paper was giving away the columnist’s work for free, it shouldn’t have had him work for free. Perhaps he’s got a point.

Newspaper penetration—the number of households looking at a paper—now amounts to less than 18 percent of the population, compared with 33 percent back in 1946. In its home market, The New York Times has a dismal 7 percent penetration. The New York Times Company, which, like the rest of the industry, used to reap tremendous profits, is one of the many publicly traded newspaper companies that have lost well over half their market value in the past two years. Just this past year, shareholders of publicly traded newspaper companies have lost 83 percent of their investments, according to Alan Mutter, an astute industry analyst, blogger and former newspaper city editor. Papers are throwing out employees almost weekly, cutting national and foreign bureaus if they have them, and slicing the actual size of the product, since newsprint is a huge cost. In some cases, entire newspapers are shutting down. Hearst Corporation is the latest to serve as executioner, announcing the likely demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer if a buyer can’t be found.

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"You Spoke, We Listened"

The Chicago Tribune responds to reader critiques of its redesign. [File opens as a large PDF.] responds to reader critiques of its redesign. [File opens as a large PDF.]

As the seeming death spiral accelerates, a sense of desperation has led some to flashy redesigns aimed at attracting younger consumers. But little is working, and the diehard readers are left with a sense of getting less. All this helps explain an extraordinary Chicago Tribune admission in its own pages that a wholesale redesign had met with significant resistance (“You Spoke, We Listened”): reader complaints included “too many ads,” “too few stories,” “the paper is too loud,” “don’t jump stories to other sections,” “it’s too hard to find things” and “bring back my Business section.” This was soon followed by the announcement that the Tribune would begin to produce a tabloid version of its traditional broadsheet for single-copy sales (as opposed to home delivery), as if geometry could provide some salvation.