Check out this story by David Akin of Canwest News Service: Reports of the newspaper's demise greatly exaggerated.

I suspect it may be one of the most corporate-p political stories Mr. Akin has ever written.

Not all of it is an advertorial for newspapers.

Yes, there will still be newspapers a year from now.

Yes, much of the trouble, especially in the U.S., stems from companies that tried to expand by making highly-leveraged acquisitions -- then got caught flat-footed when revenues collapsed as a result of this nasty recession.

Akin wrote this about his own employer:

In Canada, the country's largest publisher of major metropolitan dailies, Canwest Global Communications, is fighting to restructure its massive debt and avoid seeking bankruptcy protection.

The use of some actual numbers would be nice so we could get a sense of how massive.

Akin talks about how many papers have remained profitable, but he doesn't talk about the cuts that have been made to help that happen.

Here's an excerpt from a March 18 post: Snippets from a globeandmail.com q-and-a about newspapers:

The Toronto Star has chopped hundreds of jobs. The G&M got rid of 80 people. CanWest has cut more than 300 jobs at its newspapers. Sun Media cut about 600. The Halifax Chronicle-Herald cut a quarter of its newsroom. That's not evidence of thriving and prospering.

However, I did think this quote from Dennis Skulsky, president and CEO of Canwest Publishing, captured the essence of the problem:

"There will be newspapers," said Skulsky. "The business model in Canada, in particular, is certainly still viable but that doesn't mean it's viable forever. We have to continue to evolve and we have to get leaner. We have to invest in the future and hire and bring people into the business that move easily among the media platforms today in a digital generation."

Here's an excerpt from a Nov. 2, 2009 blog posting: The decline of autos and newspapers

“The auto industry and the print industry have essentially the same problem,” said Clay Shirky, the author of “Here Comes Everybody.” “The older customers like the older products and the new customers like the new ones.”

Back to Skulsky for a moment:

Skulsky talks about a future where newspapers deliver a print-based version to one home in a neighbourhood, a digital version to a user on a personal computer in the home next door, and yet another electronic version to the next neighbour's iPhone or other handheld device.

And then a voice that isn't tied to the fortunes of the news industry -- the aforementioned Mr. Shirky:

"There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the Internet just broke," said Clay Shirky, a New York University professor who is an influential writer and thinker about the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. In a recent essay titled "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," Shirky argued that the newspaper, as millions have come to know it, is quickly dying.

Skulsky actually seems clear-eyed about this, albiet not as fatalistic:

"Anybody who's in the business and thinks it's going to be fine when the economy recovers is missing the storm that's going to be around for a long time," said Skulsky.