The Economist:

“A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart (see article).
Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book “The Vanishing Newspaper”, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.

Related: Warren Buffet: “Newspapers are a business in permanent decline.” I think the roots of the problem can be found in this post by Brenda Konkel. Daily newspapers, despite generating tremendous margins and cash flow, have in my view, shied away – in general from the more challenging issues. A friend refers to this as “not wanting to offend anyone”. At some point, this desire will be fatal to their business models.

Finally, like any organization, with the founders long gone and the remnants simply part of larger corporations it’s unlikely that most dailies will do what’s necessary in a new media age.

Thomas C. Reeves:

Circulation for the nation’s daily newspapers has been declining steadily since 1990. In 2004 and 2005, daily circulation dropped 3.5% and the Sunday circulation declined by 4.6%. In the six months period ending in March, 2006, daily circulation fell 2.5% and the Sunday editions fell 3.1%. Readership declined in almost every demographic group and among people with all levels of education, even those with postgraduate degrees. One study found that baby boomers read newspapers a third less than their parents, and generation Xers read them a third less than the boomers.

Abbey Klaassen:

A study is about to give Madison Avenue a fresh pummeling: McKinsey & Co. is telling a host of major marketers that by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990.

That shocking statistic, delivered to the company’s Fortune 100 clients in a report on media proliferation, assumes a 15% decrease in buying power driving by cost-per-thousand rate increases; a 23% decline in ads viewed due to switching off; a 9% loss of attention to ads due to increased multitasking and a 37% decrease in message impact due to saturation.

“You’ve also got pronounced changes in consumer behavior while they’re consuming media,” said Tom French, director at McKinsey. “And ad spending is decreasingly reflecting consumer behavior.”

Chris Anderson:

• TV: network TV had its lowest ratings week ever in July.
• Music: weekly album sales set a 10-year low in July. For the year, CD album sales are down 4.2%; although digital single downloads (still less than 10% of the business) are up 77% and are nearly making up the difference in revenue terms. 
• Radio: the music radio listening audience is down 8.5% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline.
• DVDs: shipments are down 4% so far this year, more than 30 million units behind the same period last year.
• Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year.