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Where to go from here

OK, so newspapers have a problem -- what industry can afford to lose almost 10 percent of its customers in less than a decade? You have already learned one of the main reasons why: competition. Newspapers have more competition from more sources and from more directions than ever before. Americans now have many more means with which to stay informed about the world around them.

Some of these sources are able to transmit information much more quickly and efficiently than the printed newspaper, which leads us to a second main reason for the decline. Newspapers are saddled with a production and distribution system that is largely unchanged in the past 50 years. It costs a lot, comparatively, to put together, print and move a newspaper to the point where a carrier can throw it in your bushes. Not to mention, someone must first kill a tree to make a newspaper.

Those offering suggestions about how to reverse newspapers' troubling decline can typically be divided into two camps:

• "Build a better mousetrap camp." These people believe newspapers have lost touch with modern consumers, particularly younger ones. "Improve your product," they say. "Make it more colorful, more exciting, more in tune with the times," they believe, "and the readers will return."

• "Build a new mousetrap camp." This group believes that no improvements can stop what has become an irreversible trend, and that the printed newspaper is destined for the same fate as the blacksmith shop. Nothing short of entirely new methods to deliver its information will save the newspaper, they insist.

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