From out of the din

The cacophony of wildly diverse opinions on the state of newspapers today can be distressing for some, gleeful to some and bewildering to others. What it is NOT is enlightening because the discussion is fueled on a false premise that newspapers are dying.
Now, before you start swinging again, take a breath and follow my logic.
As I was a young lad in Chicago, our household had three daily newspapers to read -- The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago American and the Chicago Sun-Times. The American (or rather its evolved version, The Chicago Today) died as many PM newspapers died.
We thought then that newspapers were dying and TV was killing them.
Let's get a little perspective.
According the Illinois Newspaper Project, run by the University of Illinois and the Chicago History Museum, "Today there are more than 450 current newspaper titles published in Illinois."
That's 450 newspapers in one state -- daily and weekly.
Now take what is widely being circulated as proof that newspapers are dying -- figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation. The latest figures show that circulation for all AUDITED newspapers dropped 5% last year. The problem with citing this figure is it represents roughly 500 newspapers. By last count I believe there are 1,500 daily newspapers and 8,000 weekly newspapers in the U.S. That's hardly representative of all newspapers in America.
However, let's use the ABC figures for remainder of this argument. Newspapers that lost 10% or more of circulation include The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Star-Ledger of Newark, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Orange County Register and The Detroit News.
See anything common about those cities? They are ones served by more than one newspaper.
There is a widely circulated "death watch" list of newspapers purported to be the next to fail. With one exception, all of them are newspapers in cities that are served by more than one newspaper.
Allow me then to posit this theory -- this is not a matter of newspapers failing en masse. In some cases, newspapers are dropping readership that is too hard and costly to serve. So losses are self-inflicted. And in the big cities where a lot of the losses are happening, I would suggest that time-pressed readers are not able to read as many newspapers so they are culling their choice to one.
The injuries that newspapers are feeling now are not related to readership losses. Rather it is coming from loss of advertising revenue -- especially classifieds from large declines in auto (very little metal is moving anywhere), real estate (again, home sales are down) and employment (no jobs to advertise).
This is to suggest that our financial woes are cyclical and tied to the present economy and not an overall abandonment of newspapers.