Mourning Old Media's Decline

Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it. The paradox of the many layoff announcements is that newspapers and magazines do not have an audience problem — newspaper Web sites are a vital source of news, and growing — but they do have a consumer problem. Stop and think about where you are reading this summary. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in the minority. This same information is available to many more millions on this paper's Web site, in RSS feeds, on hand-held devices, linked and summarized all over the Web. Historically, people took an interest in the daily paper about the time they bought a home. Now they are checking their BlackBerrys for alerts about mortgage rates.