And there will be further ones from their decision to attach themselves to a failing internet advertising company.

Buffeted by an ongoing advertising recession, The New York Times Company and the Gannett Company announced yesterday that their first-quarter profits declined while the Tribune Company reported a loss. The disappointing results underscored the increasingly tough economic times faced by the industry as advertisers continued to shift their focus away from print to the Internet. In particular, areas like real estate and classified, previously rich revenue generators for newspapers, continued to be weak.

2007-05-11: Nothing surprising in here.
2007-08-06: A forecast

Online ads to overtake US newspapers in 2011, which assumes that newspaper spending will not sharply decline. Recent news out of those same sounds very different

2007-08-10: NYT revenue drops by >50%, 50% of employees get fired, and the company still loses money. EBITDA would have dropped from $118M to -$64M. Which means that management would just be getting ready to fire a few 100 more people.
2007-09-01: Good riddance to lazy newspapers who add the same amount of value with their wire service articles as real estate agents: 0.

This is potentially explosive, I think. Whenever I search for a news story in Google News, I get 100s of identical versions of that story from newspapers that picked it up from Associated Press — and I may even click through to the first newspaper that has a copy. But if I can see the story from the wire service itself, before it was edited or shortened or changed, I would probably prefer that.

2008-05-08: The Onion nails it

Dying Newspaper Trend Buys 3 More Weeks. It’s nice to see that the printed word is still, at least for now, the most powerful medium for reporting on the death of the printed word.

2009-03-13: It’s not ignorance, it’s denial.

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them. The pragmatists were pointing out that the real world was looking like the unthinkable scenario. The people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

2012-05-10: The reason newspapers are dying is because they are cutting their face to spite their nose. Like making digital only subscriptions more expensive than bundles. Same reason why everyone downloads Game of Thrones: It is impossible to pay for it if you don’t want to burden yourself with cable. You are making your piracy bed, now you have to lie in it.

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