As Cities Go From Two Papers to One, Talk of Zero

Denver, Seattle and Tucson still have daily papers, but now, some economists and newspaper executives say it is only a matter of time — and probably not much time at that — before some major American city is left with no prominent local newspaper at all. "In 2009 and 2010, all the two-newspaper markets will become one-newspaper markets, and you will start to see one-newspaper markets become no-newspaper markets," said Mike Simonton, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, who analyzes the industry. Many critics and competitors of newspapers — including online start-ups that have been hailed as the future of journalism — say that no one should welcome their demise. No one knows which will be the first big city without a large paper, but there are candidates all across the country -- San Francisco, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, New Haven. Ad revenue, the industry's lifeblood, has dropped about 25 percent in the last two years (by comparison, automotive revenue for Detroit's Big Three fell about 15 percent during the same period, although it has accelerated recently), and that slide, accelerated by the recession, shows no sign of leveling off in 2009. And magnifying the problem, for many chains, is a heavy burden of debt that they took on, mostly in a spree of buying other newspapers from 2005 to 2007, just before the bottom dropped out of the business.