A piece in today’s New York Times reports on the bleak outlook for the newspaper industry. final year, brought the second-worst decline in ad revenue in more than 60 years, with only 2001, a recession, coming in worse.

Essentially, newspaper advertising broke its cyclical mold — booming and fading with the broader economy. There was a substantial decline in 2007 unaccompanied by broader profitable woes. Print circulation is down, and according to the Times online revenue can’t produce up the gap: “… for every dollar advertisers pay to reach a print reader, they pay about 5 cents, on average, to reach an Net reader. Newspapers need to narrow that gap, but the rise in World Wide Web revenue slowed sharply final year.”

The problem for most newspapers is that they are finding themselves without much of a moat on the

Net — Being the major newspaper in a small city is very different from competing with literally everyone else for web traffic. News aggregators such as Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), and RSS feeds are probably killing newspapers.

Warren Buffett was once a big fan of small newspapers but unfortunately, all the reasons he liked them are no longer true: They don’t have monopolies anymore. You can set up My Yahoo! to deliver you local news and there’s just no reason to buy a newspaper for national news with the wealth of online resources available.

Newspapers aren’t dead yet but they’re definitely dying and I can’t think of anything that could possibly reverse it.

Original post by Zac Bissonnette

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