When Chicago real estate magnate Sam Zell bought Tribune Company in December 2007, he no doubt thought he could turn the ailing media giant around in six months. Part of the deal was a leveraged buyout that saddled Tribune with nearly $13 billion in debt by taking the company private and creating an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). Zell and his head honchos, Randy Michaels and Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams, known for his hallucinogenic ramblings about newspapers being the “new rock and roll,” set out to reinvent the news.

Zell’s cowboy style, replete with f-bombs and calling his employees “partners,” was at first a relief from stuffy former CEO Dennis Fitzsimons. But the self-professed Grave Dancer didn’t anticipate the double-digit declines in revenue and advertising that plagued all media companies, especially the newspaper sector, throughout 2008, and by December, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. "It's the deal from hell," Zell said in a Business Week interview. "And it will continue to be the deal from hell until we turn it around."

The cuts started almost immediately.  Newsroom staffs were slashed.  Foreign and state bureaus were closed.  Employee benefits were reduced or cut out entirely.  The news-to-advertising ratio went from 60/40 to 50/50.  National and world news became a bullet-pointed half page.  Flashy redesigns of everything from the front page to the Op/Ed’s attempted in vain to draw in younger readers from the Web site. Subscribers, disgusted with rising subscription rates and cuts in everything from local news to the comics, canceled in droves.  Real estate advertising, once a staple of newspaper revenue, fell victim to the housing crisis and the downturn in the economy. Help Wanted ads dribbled away as the unemployment rate rose to over eight percent.  Other advertisers moved away from expensive print to free Internet sites like Craigslist, Yelp and Citysearch.

It’s not just Tribune that’s suffering; it is across-the-board bad news for newspapers all across the country.  On January 15, the Minneapolis Star Tribune filed for bankruptcy. On February 21, Philadelphia Newspapers LLC, owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News, and Philly.com, and the Yardley, Pennsylvania-based Journal Register Company, owner of 20 dailies, both filed for bankruptcy. February also saw the closing of E.W. Scripps Rocky Mountain News and March the end of the print version of Hearst Corp.’s 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which moved to an online-only publication, seattlepi.com, with a skeleton staff of 20. Add decreasing advertising revenue and circulation to the rising costs involved with actually producing a physical newspaper, like newsprint, ink, delivery trucks and staff compensation, and the picture getsbleaker.

Even the mighty and heretofore seemingly-untouchable New York Times is feeling the pinch, responding to revenue loss by selling part of its Times Square headquarters to W. P. Carey and Co. for $225 million, eliminating dividends, laying off 100 workers on March 26 and announcing “temporary” wage cuts for management.

What caused the meteoric mass exodus away from daily print newspapers? Had the paradigm shifted?

The answer is lots of things. Daily newspaper reading trends are following a decades-long decline. In 1964, over 80 percent of adult men and women read a daily newspaper. By 1997 that figure dropped to 58 percent and by 2007 it dropped again to 47 percent.  A second study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press drops the rate of print-only daily readership down to 27 percent for 2008. That means that little more than a quarter of the adult population still read a physical daily newspaper. And there are fewer daily newspapers to read. Journalism.org states that “after 35 years of television, the cold war, Vietnam, the Me Decade, Howard Cosell and the "Gong Show," in 1980 there were 1,745 daily newspapers in the United States, only four fewer than the number in 1945. After 1980, however, the situation changed, and the number of newspapers began an uninterrupted annual decline (-0.8 percent). By 2002, there were just 1,457 papers left in the country, 17 percent fewer than 22 years before.”

What has changed? Sources say it’s not just that big bugaboo, the Internet, that’s stealing print readers away. Basically, it’s the way we get our news. This is the world of instantaneous news, of citizen journalism and “new media” competitors like bloggers (Politico, The Huffington Post), nonprofit online news sources (Voiceofsandiego.org, St. Louis Beacon) and social networking sites (Twitter). Theodore Glasser, professor of communications at Stanford University, “doubts that such ventures can compensate for the loss of newspaper newsrooms.  ‘I've seen nothing in the blogosphere that provides the sustained, systematic coverage that a good newsroom provides. Not even close,’ he says.” Philadelphia entrepreneur Brian Tierney, one of a group of wealthy investors who bought the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News three years ago, agrees.

"We had a series recently on the EPA and the Bush administration; it took several months to do it, it cost a quarter of a million dollars to do that. I can't do that with two bloggers," Tierney said. "I can't do that the way all-news radio in this market does it, where they basically buy our paper and then paraphrase our stories every day. We are the originators of the investigative work that needs to be done."

And who can forget Woodward and Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters whose research uncovered the Watergate scandal and brought down a president? Can a blogger handle (let alone afford) such in-depth investigation?

The technology of newsgathering has also changed, allowing for instant newsbytes on devices that are small enough to fit in your pocket. Over one third (37 percent) of smart phone users get their news through these devices. When US Airways flight 1549 was forced to land in the Hudson River on January 15, Janis Krums, from Sarasota, Florida, used his iPhone to post the first picture of the crash site on Twitter long before the traditional media arrived on-scene.

The demographic is also changing. Baby Boomers and pre-1946 readers make up the largest group of print-version-only readers, but even their numbers are decreasing. The generational age groups can be broken down even further into trend-readers, like the growing minority of well-educated, middle-aged, affluent readers that get their news from both traditional sources and online.  They’ve even got a name for them: Integrators. Pew describes them as “a more engaged, sophisticated and demographically sought-after audience segment. . . Integrators share some characteristics with a smaller, younger, more internet savvy audience segment - Net-Newsers - who principally turn to the web for news, and largely eschew traditional sources. Integrators spend more time with the news on a typical day…[and] enjoy keeping up with the news a lot than in any other news segment.”

Next are the News Grazers, a 51 percent majority, who get their news from a variety of sources in spits and spats during the course of the day. You get the picture.  Regardless of which group you look at, the number of print readers is in rapid decline.

So what happens when the watchdog is banished from his high-ground post at the henhouse door of government? What happens when the in-depth coverage by trained journalists becomes a sort of Wikipedia-like citizen/crowd-sourcing infotainment? Will the market bear the vaccuum? And for how long?

The Pew survey “asked readers if they would feel the loss of either print or online versions of their local newspaper. Forty-two percent said they would not miss their city paper much or at all. The survey showed a large portion of these readers were Americans 39 and younger (48 percent) -- a demographic newspapers are struggling to attract. Twenty-six percent didn't think the loss would hurt civic life in their communities, and nearly 30 percent said there would be other ways to get news if their local paper shut down.”

What’s the solution? Should all print newspapers go the way of the Seattle P-I and become scaled-down online-only versions with a subscription charge? Opting to charge for a newspaper’s Web site can be both a good and a bad thing, and might in fact send the print product on a faster death spiral. Web advertisers base their choices on the amount of traffic to a site and if the traffic significantly decreases due to subscription charges, they will advertise elsewhere.  And remember—it’s a 50/50 ad-driven business now.

It may be too late to save the daily newspaper. The very nature of a newspaper, which contains yesterday’s news, is becoming obsolete in our brave new tech-savvy world.

"This democracy might survive with a different-looking press," said Geneva Overholser, former Des Moines Register editor, now dean of the USC School of Journalism. "But I don't think we've figured out a complete menu that would replace newspapers.  Newsrooms in newspapers have been the predominant source of original reporting about what's going on in city hall, in classrooms, about Washington, about the international scene. There'll be a time when we do really need to stand up and say, 'Wait a minute!' … and it's getting pretty close."

The demise of the government watchdog press may indeed be closer than we think. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called a hearing yesterday to discuss the need for an antitrust exemption to help save the papers in her home town of San Francisco. The Washington Post reports the proceedings: "The House Judiciary Committee called a hearing yesterday to study the decline of the newspaper business, but it quickly deteriorated into a press-bashing session. Ideologues of the left and right made no effort to conceal their yearning for a day without journalists, when public officials would no longer be scrutinized. . .Law professor C. Edwin Baker told the committee that 'the biggest correlator with less government corruption is newspaper readership: When people are reading newspapers, corruption goes down.'. . The dominant sentiment of lawmakers was indifference; most of the 14 subcommittee members didn't show up."

Some say good riddance; let the horse and buggy make way for the automobile. Others say it is the newspapers themselves who have brought about their own decline. Accusations of pontificating, editorializing, slanting and philosophizing the news are coming from all quarters, like “madprof44,” who posted the following in response to CBS Sunday Morning’s March 29 episode called “Stop the presses!”

“The coverage of important events, from the war in Iraq to last year's election, has been so obviously slanted that much of your readership no longer trusts you. The media changed before the marketplace did. I for one am sad to see you go, but what I'll mourn is what you used to be. Unfortunately, at the very moment you need the loyalty and trust of your readership you've made yourselves dispensable.”

One forecast predicts that only a few large-scale papers, like the New York Times and the Washington Post, will continue to produce a print edition, becoming more regional to compensate for the loss of smaller surrounding papers. Many cities that now host two dailies will soon find themselves without even one. It’s a grim forecast for an institution that has been the main source of newsgathering, watchdog investigation, community involvement and entertainment for the last millennium. Rest in peace, oh fair rag of ink and excess. We who are about to buy smart phones salute you.