Has the death knell for newspapers been sounded? Not quite, according to an article through the e-Commerce Times (which, inturn quotes the Newspaper Association of America):

The NAA said its analysis of circulation reports from 770 newspapers found circulation at the average daily fell 2.8 percent between March and September of this year.

… However, the group said when Web site visitation figures from the Nielsen//NetRatings are factored in, newspapers appear far more healthy. Some 58 million Web users visited newspaper sites in September, a record number, the group said, and in the third quarter, the average amount of time users spent on those sites was up to 41 minutes per month, an 11 percent jump over last year.

It provides a nice epilogue to the dialogue started by the New York Times.
But clearly newspapers will have to join every other internet concern that is publishing content. They’ll have to deal with the same issues around fee vs. free, the development of blogs, citizen journalism, the rise of video blogging, and having to deal with Google and other young pups for ad revenue (partering, competing).

Its a tough environment to do well.

But newspapers will have an edge that many other startups don’t.

They’ve got their name and they’ve each got a brand.

For newspapers to succeed, they’ll have to transcend their nuts and bolts, brick and mortar identities, and start embracing their brands. That is, ultimately, the name, the recognition, and the trust behind many newspaper brands is really what they’re worth — and its something that is worth gold in an on-line presence.

Coke, after all, is nothing more than sugar water with sophisticated branding strategy.

Its inevitable that newspapers will die in the way that their current incarnation; but as trusted purveyors of information, they’ll continue to live on in another form — in as many forms as they need to transform into.

The question is how fast they’ll be able to adopt. And if they’ll be able to develop other revenue streams other than their traditional dependency on ads.

30 years, as the article mentions, is far too long for ad revenue to finally kick in for these aging behemoths.