In 2008, newspapers made $37.848 billion. Yes, they made a full $10 billion more last year than they did this year, a staggering drop of 27.2%. Nearly all of that loss was from print:

In 2000, newspapers peaked at $48.67 billion in revenue. This came entirely from print

The old newspaper model is simply not going to be market-viable as we head deeper in the digital age

The U.S. newspaper industry was already facing numerous challenges before the economy took a nosedive, but the latest data from the Newspaper Association of America shows that the current economic climate has only exacerbated the already dire state of the American newspaper industry.

Specifically, total newspaper advertising revenue fell 16.6% in 2008.

Classifieds advertising, which is under a lot of pressure from online ventures like Craigslist, fell almost 30%, and real estate classifieds fell 38%.

Its advertising and circulation are being drained away by the Internet, and its owners seem stricken by a failure of the entrepreneurial imagination needed to prosper in the electronic age.

Surveys showing that more and more young people get their news from television and computers

Rupert Murdoch

Most media gurus agree that the paper-and-ink newspaper is on the decline and will eventually become a relic.

If a market for news content still exists, it’s believed, newspaper organizations will just have to adapt their methods of delivery.

The rationale: people have to get their news from somewhere, right?

Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world’s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to The Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses.

The rise of the Internet and the epochal change from print to digital technology have created a massive wave of competition for traditional news companies, scattering readers and advertisers across a radically altered news and information landscape and triggering mergers, bankruptcies and consolidation among the owners of print and broadcasting properties.

will take the company private, meaning he will not have to report quarterly earnings to shareholders or be subjected to investors’ demands for ever-rising profits,

Enter the Internet news voucher. Under our proposal, each news article on the web will end by asking readers whether it contributed to their political understanding. If so, they can click the yes-box, and send the message to a National Endowment for Journalism -- which would obtain an annual appropriation from the government. This money would be distributed to news organizations on the basis of a strict mathematical formula: the more clicks, the bigger the check from the Endowment.

a news organization must have a group of editors and fact-checkers committed to journalistic integrity.

Although the Internet may have destroyed the newspaper's old business model, we can use it to create a new decentralized system that may generate an even more vibrant marketplace of ideas for the twenty-first century.

If present readership trends continue indefinitely, says the University of North Carolina professor, the last daily newspaper reader will check out in 2044. October 2044, to be exact.

Compared with the rest of the media industry, newspapers are doing no worse, and in some respects quite a bit better, than the competition, including the Internet.

The major fear in the newspaper industry is that today's young people won't grow into the next generation of readers.