Derek Thompson at The Atlantic:
Call it creative if you want, but this is what economic destruction looks like. Print newspaper ads have fallen by two-thirds from $60 billion in the late–1990s to $20 billion in 2011.
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So the reason newspapers are in trouble isn’t that they aren’t making lots of money – they still are; advertising is a huge, huge business, as any app developer will try to tell you – but that their business models and payroll depend on so much more money. The U.S. newspaper industry was built to support $50 billion to $60 billion in total advertising with the kind of staffs that a $50 billion industry can abide. The layoffs, buyouts, and bankruptcies you hear about are the result of this massive correction in the face of falling revenue.