This time with my emphasis: in short, a newspaper can have the best web strategy in the world, but it ain't worth a bag of beans if the mother ship don't float:
"It's going a lot worse than anybody predicted, and if we have double-digit ad declines for two years, some newspapers will be in real financial jeopardy," said Edward Atorino, an analyst at Benchmark.
Even with less severe losses, he said, "You're going to see structural changes: Papers could drop a day or two per week, they could outsource printing."
He said that he expected the decline in ad sales to slow, with 2008 producing a 10 percent drop for the year, but he cautioned that, like other analysts, he had not been pessimistic enough so far.
The primary long-term threat to newspapers is the Internet's siphoning away of ad revenue, a trend that has been under way for more than a decade, but one that has picked up speed in the last year.
Advertisers have vastly more choices online than on paper, so newspaper Web sites win only a fraction of the advertising that goes digital, and it pays much less than advertising in print.
At the same time, the Internet has drawn millions of new readers to papers, and the major ones reach far more readers than ever before.
En bref: You can have 58 million visitors, you can have 158 million visitors, but if the CPM is peanuts to gold bars, who cares?
Think print, stay alive.
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