“The warnings and elegies for the big-city newspaper have been done to
the point of exhaustion, and I don’t want to beat a breaking-down horse
of a medium that I actually like. But the picture keeps worsening.
Yearly ad falloffs at many such places are accelerating past 15%. At
sundry recent points I’ve mistaken some twitch in the data for a market
bottom, and each time I’ve had newspaper executives tell me I’m
completely wrong. It’s now time to start considering what was once
unthinkable: the post-newspaper media economy in our nation’s cities.”