So what will happen next? Rob Curley, the vice president for product development at the Washington Post, said, “I think newspapers lost their way and started focusing on big investigative stuff and forgot to cover the prom or 10-year-olds playing baseball.”  

To survive the rise of the Internet, newspapers should center on local news; their online editions should also offer video, photos, and extra content to supplement the print version. This is the seismic shift happening in newspapers today.

I think once newspapers start covering the prom and PTA meetings again, the papers in the middle -- not quite the upper echelon, but not the small dailies, either -- should suffer the most pain. Grand gray ladies like the Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune have all scaled back their foreign and national coverage, leaving that to the few papers of record that remain truly global: the New York Times, the Washington Post (WPO) and the Wall Street Journal.

The rest will become “hyperlocal” - which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As it turns out, people want to read about what’s going on in their own communities. The web -- though it can tell you what’s going on in the war in Iraq, the presidential campaign and what 4,173 bloggers think about it -- can’t usually provide that.

In the end, newspapers haven't yet found a way to survive in an online world. Newspapers must consider themselves as whole journalistic entities, not merely a collection of ink-stained pages. Although some companies, such as the New York Times, have posted double-digit increases in online ad revenue this year, all the news that’s fit to print must now fight with all the rest of it for survival.