The Globe and Mail's John Ibbitson tut-tuts about the fate of U.S. newspapers. Canadian online news vet Wayne MacPhail says, "I told you so."

From Ibbitson's July 9 column:

Consider three examples of the damage the Internet is doing to newspapers. Remember the days when people went apartment hunting by reading the classifieds? Today, apartment rentals have virtually disappeared from newspapers, along with most other classified ads. Why use a newspaper, when craigslist.com's classifieds include photos and full descriptions of every available apartment in town?

Then there's Amazon.com. In the past year, I've purchased books, CDs, headphones, a GPS and a lawn sprinkler from the site. Not only are the prices good and delivery swift, the customer reviews afford a valuable tip sheet, warning of sound leakage from this brand of headphones or a part that keeps snapping off that make of lawn sprinkler. The most elaborate and expensive marketing campaigns can be undermined by a few dozen warnings from dissatisfied customers on Amazon.com and similar sites.

Finally, imagine you live in a mid-sized American city. Your local paper carries several pages of national and international news, all of it from wire services. But why would you read what's printed there? If you're interested in national and international news, why wouldn't you go straight to The New York Times website, or access the latest wire stories through Yahoo? Why would you read your local columnist's take on the presidential election when RealClearPolitics.com lists the best political commentary of the day?

Simply put, the traditional model of the broadsheet newspaper makes less and less sense. And newspapers know it. Some are responding by going “hyper-local,” focusing resources on neighbourhood, as well as local and regional news. Others are scrambling to integrate their broadsheet and web operations. Others are just selling off assets and praying that something comes along.

The traditional newspaper still offers some technological advantages over its online competitors. You can read it on the bus. Its pages can rank stories by importance more effectively than a web page can. It's easier to read.

The old and new technologies will co-exist for a number of years yet. But not forever. And during the transition, some newspapers will report their own demise.

Today, the Globe published a letter to the editor from Wayne MacPhail:

There's no doubt that John Ibbitson is right: Newspapers are in mortal peril (Extra, Extra, Read All About It - Or, Sadly, Not - July 9). But the fault for that lies squarely on the papers' own ink-stained shoulders. In the early 1990s, newspapers could have created their own craigslist, heck, even their own amazon.

They didn't do it not because these were disruptive technologies coming out of left field but because newsroom folks and their overlords dismissed the Web as the faddish domain of amateurs, worried about cannibalization of the print product and focused on short-term profit and business models that hung on newsrooms like ill-fitting suits.

Back in the '90s, I worked with a great team at Southam InfoLab. We warned this day would come, and we were ignored. So, while it is sad that newspapers are dying, they look to me like the kinds of deaths newspapers don't usually report on, performed by their own hands.

I can't say that I predicted Craigslist (if I were that smart, it would be Billslist :) ) But if one were to examine my writings from the mid to late 1990s, I opined that newspapers could die the death of a thousand revenue cuts at the hands of Web-based competitors.

I can remember the days when editors thought not every reporter would need their own email address or that one computer with Internet access would be enough. Yes, it's stupid in retrospect, but it should have been seen as stupid back then.

In late 1997, the Philadelphia Inquirer did a landmark online treatment of the Black Hawk Down series by Mark Bowden.  I was working at the Edmonton Journal at the time. Murdoch Davis -- then the editor, and an otherwise smart guy and very capable newspaper guy -- essentially had this to say about it: Why bother? Why not put those resources into the newspaper?

As to the Journal's own website, there was once a story going around that he told j-students at Grant MacEwan Community College that if the website ever got too successful, he'd shut it down. Davis denied saying such a thing.

I doubt the newspaper industry could have created an Amazon or a Craigslist. For one thing, those are entrepreneurial ventures, and newspapers get their shorts in a knot about dropping a comic strip. In addition, to create something like an Amazon or a Craigslist, one has to get technology.

While things have improved, at the time when those innovations were incubating, the newspaper industry had precious few people (InfoLab excepted :) ) with the techthink who could have made such innovations happen -- or the executives with the vision or foresight to understand just how much the Internet would change things and who would solidly back the innovators they did employ.

Oh well. Maybe they'll handle the Next Big Thing better.