A few articles on the restructuring working its inexorable grip on the U.S. newspaper business (from a list posted to online-news by Steve Yelvington).

From a Feb. 18 column by the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein -- News Media Grope for the Right Formula:

It will take years of experimentation, involving companies of all sizes and vintages, for the news media to refine the new models and settle into a sustainable new structure. No doubt great fortunes will be made or lost in the process. But in the end, I suspect, our industry, like most others, will come to be dominated by a handful of national and super-regional news organizations that can offer readers and advertisers a full range of differently priced news products through a variety of media.

From the Feb. 20 Washington Post -- Hard News: Daily Papers Face Unprecedented Competition:

"Natural societal things are going on," said Steve Lerch, a newspaper advertising buyer for Campbell Mithun of Minneapolis. "You can't take a half-hour to read the newspaper and eat a bowl of cereal in the morning. People aren't eating cereal anymore, either. I know -- I have General Mills as a client. People are eating yogurt bars on the way in to work."

Frank A. Blethen, publisher of the Seattle Times, said his industry has some breathing room left. But not much.

"The baby boomers are going to continue to drive print [sales] for some time," he said. "The problem we have are the . . . 18- to 35-year-olds. They're not replacing the baby boomers."

Others are more blunt, if hyperbolic.

"Print is dead," Sports Illustrated President John Squires told a room full of newspaper and magazine circulation executives at a conference in Toronto in November. His advice? "Get over it," meaning publishers should stop trying to save their ink-on-paper product and focus on electronic delivery of their journalism.

From Forbes -- Stopping the presses:

People may decreasingly read news from branded and trusted newspapers, but, surveys show, they do want to read it from them online.

There lies the trap for serious journalism. Going online has not yet worked convincingly for many newspapers. Despite spending billions to create online editions, these are read by fewer people, less frequently and less fully than print editions are.

There are exceptions, mostly at the quality end of journalism. The New York Times, for one, has extended its editorial footprint enormously by going online. But even it is struggling to generate the profitability online it needs to support its journalism.

Ten years into the era of publishing via the Internet, most online editions still depend upon newsprint editions for content and financial support. The catch-22 is that those newsprint editions can decreasingly afford to provide it.

Addendum:

I missed it the first time, but Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz also wrote on the MSM's travails on Feb. 21.

Some excerpts:

Could this be the perfect storm of bad news for the news media?

Already hemorrhaging readers and viewers and losing public trust, the mainstream media are being battered hourly by the surging denizens of the blogosphere, accused of raw partisanship, rank incompetence and conspiratorial coverups.

Newspapers, networks and magazines aren't likely to vanish anytime soon (and if they did, what would the bloggers talk about?), but their credibility is under assault as never before, and a series of self-inflicted wounds haven't helped.

A lengthy round-up of the usual suspects -- Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley, pre-war WMD reportage -- is given as examples.

But Kurtz acknowledges what the MSM does/should do better than anybody else: investigative reporting, covering global news events, covering important institutions at all levels.

But now, for the first time, millions of people with access to a wide audience (at least among the wired) are looking over the shoulders of journalists, or practicing journalism themselves. They are Googling and Nexis-ing and dissecting video and transcripts. Many bloggers are careful and thought-provoking, others partisan or mean-spirited. But they are here to stay, and by and large they provide a healthy check on those who once monopolized the news agenda. ...

Charlie Madigan, who writes a blog for the Chicago Tribune, had this message for his Old Media colleagues: "Shut up with your whining and appreciate the fact that, after generations of stagnation, something new has arrived. . . . Conventional journalism seems aghast that a whole collection of independent voices from all sides of the political spectrum are popping up now to pick and smear and slander and point accusing fingers, wreck careers, cast aspersions and introduce something besides a century-old sense of entitled hierarchy to the formula for news presentation."