The Post and other papers are dying because of technology and nothing else. Even a 100 percent conservative newspaper today would be dying. It has to do with Ipads and other items that give you instant news and the stories that go with it. London is a bit different in that most rid the subway to work so they have the time to read an actual newspaper or some will read the Ipad but they will have newspapers longer than America because of the transportation differences.
Small town and community newspapers are doing OK and some are even growing. The problem with big metro dailies is their big metro base, which has either bailed to the suburbs or doesn’t know how to read.
He's right. Look at the financial problems of the Washington Times. Same market, conservative politics, but similar financial problems.
I could say a lot more about the technological challenges, and the problems caused by losing the classified ad market, and the inherent problems of delivering news that is half a day old at best, and that fact that Facebook ads and company websites are an effective means to communicate one’s product in small-town America (though not as much for national branding campaigns which still require aggressive ad sales) but others have said much of what I would have said.
Here's the bottom line. The internet is destroying print newspapers in ways that pose a completely different technological challenge than what has previously been faced by print media.
Radio didn't kill newspapers because even though radio could deliver the news more quickly, it had no visuals, no persistency (i.e., you couldn't read it later like a newspaper), and there are severe limits on the amount of content. Thirty seconds is a HUGE amount of time to dedicate to a single news story. Television didn't kill newspapers, even though it added visuals to the speed of radio delivery, because it still couldn't deliver in-depth news or provide persistency.
The internet allows news to be available 24-7 and archived forever, which is something even print newspapers can't really provide since most people don't store old newspapers, and even then they usually aren't indexed and searchable. The internet allows stories to be as long as a writer and editor thinks are needed; electrons are cheap today in the era of massive bandwidth. Plus there is the visual advantage of television and the immediacy of both TV and radio.
How can print media compete against that? It can't.
The problem is that ad revenue generated by internet ads today isn't even close to what it takes to run a major newspaper. That will probably change with time, but it may never be where things were in the 1950s and 1960s with print ad revenue since it's now possible for an advertiser to contact potential customers through other forms of very cheap internet direct marketing.