死んでしまったら私のことなんか誰も話さない

Newsrooms shrunk by layoffs and battered by bloggers, are seeing their traditional audiences shrink. Daily newspapers lost 1.2 million readers in the six months that ended in March, down to 45.5 million. Online newspaper readership grew to 56 million.

Despite declining circulation, newspapers are still among the most profitable corporations in America, with an average profit last year of 21 percent, Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine noted recently, almost twice what the average Fortune 500 corporation earns.

But those profits are dropping and may hit the 14 percent range within five years, Fine predicts. Profits at the 13 publicly traded newspaper companies fell an average of 20 percent in 2005, another industry survey reports.

But the Merc, in the heart of Silicon Valley full of computer engineers and early adopters of technology, was unable to attract more than 10,000 paying users before it abandoned that business model.

Advertising, which provides about 75 percent of the revenue of American newspapers, and 100 percent for television networks, is going online in a big way. Total Internet advertising spending in 2005, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Pricewaterhouse Coopers reported, rose 30 percent, to $12.5 billion, and in the first quarter of 2006 reached a record $3.9 billion.

While print advertising revenue is nearly flat, advertising spending for newspapers' online editions in the same time frame shot up 35 percent. The actual revenue, at $613 million, is just a fraction of what the print version collects, but that fraction has been increasing steadily over time.

"The question no longer is whether the newspaper will endure, but whether the kind of news that is essential to a functioning democracy will survive"