adrianmott.com

The slow death of newspaper companies is something that is rooted in both the reduction of readers of the traditional physical newspaper and the oncoming train that is online news.  Well it appears that readership of online news has finally caught up to the physical paper and now forces traditional newspaper companies to downsize and re-think their revenue models or die.

The latest news is that the SF Chronicle is in big trouble.  Hearst, the parent company of the Chronicle (and many other newspapers) has announced that the paper has been losing money to the tune of $50 Million in 2008 alone.  The paper faces major downsizing and may end up being sold or closing its doors for good:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/24/BUannounce.DTL&tsp=1

So the obvious answer becomes, what happens to local newspapers?  Advertising has thus far (barely) held up the websites where people have been increasingly consuming their news, but this source of revenue will not sustain an entire newspaper distribution operation.  This might very well spell the end of the physical newspaper and a major boom in hardware devices to read meda like the Kindle and iPhone.  In any case, it will be very interesting to see how these companies re-invent and re-structure themselves going forward.