I tend to consider such reports as a postive sign of movement to web news as the wave of the future. However, consider what this means in the short term. As they lay off local news staff, they will tend to print feeds from a national source... the New York Times and AP. They have to pay those national sources. So the income to NYT and AP increases, prolonging their survival. For a decade or so, we may actually see a worst environment for unbiased reporting.
The Times Goes Soft
...The difficulty for the Times and its shareholders is that online revenues, while likely to rise to $250 million this year, are still dwarfed by the core newspaper business. I sense that management would love to awaken to miraculously find Internet-related operations constituting the bulk of its business. While the company has been slow to leverage this shift, investors have watched their share price decline steadily from around $50 four years ago to slightly below $23 today.
Reinsurance Abuses At End, Buffett Says
...Buffett said declines in circulation result from readers turning to alternative sources , such as free Web sites and television. And he said owning the dominant news Web site in a region is not enough to guarantee sustained profitability for newspaper firms.
As an example, he cited Buffalo, where Berkshire owns the Buffalo News and Buffalo.com, which he described as the most popular news Web site in the city. "We've got the best position, but it isn't remotely like owning the paper 30 years ago."
Buffett said buying newspapers was once an excellent investment because the dominant paper in any city could count on steady advertising revenue and could raise ad rates, often as much as it wanted, every year. With circulation dropping, that is no longer the case, Buffett said.