The shape of thing to come?

The overall trend is ghoulish, appropriately enough, on this Halloween 2009. Newspaper circulations are hemorrhaging readership worse than a slasher movie victim hemorrhages blood. The Washington Post explains the details.


But the essence is that almost everybody is seeing huge and fatal losses in circulation that can't be sustained more than a couple more years unless stopped.


But those few exceptions suggest which print newspapers may survive.


First off, the only large daily to see a gain was the Wall Street Journal. This suggests that a print newspaper with high quality house-generated content might survive in a few knowledge-based niches. The WSJ for finance, but are there other niches where this kind of model might work.


The other newspaper seeing gains are all smaller dailies that cover small and medium-sized cities. In many cases these cities have no other regular media covering them -- not even TV. This could be considered another niche market where there's enough demand for the information that people are willing to pay for it, and a restricted supply of quality news providers.