I don’t think it is.
The print edition is dead.
If the newspaper owners could figure out how to market their product electronically, they would be fine.
That would require:
1) Telling the truth about the failures of social democracy.
2) Lowering the online subscription cost to about $10/year.
I don't think any of our existing newspapers can handle either change.
I dont think the free local weeklies are dead. There is a big market for local paper and advertising.
“If the newspaper owners could figure out how to market their product electronically, they would be fine.”
The real problem is that newspapers use to own a local market monopoly on daily information exchange. There was a single giant printing press at the center of each distribution area, and ad sellers and ad consumers had only a single place to go. Newspapers could set their ad prices arbitrarily high, and they did.
With the advent of the Internet, that monopoly is dead forever. The cost to buy and sell ads approaches zero, the cost to distribute approaches zero, the pages to place ads approaches infinity, and the readership approaches infinity.
Moving everything online at this point simply means a former newspaper is nothing more than one more of a billion web sites that advertisers can choose from and pay tiny fractions of a cent per ad. No way to make up the monopoly revenue lost through print publishing. Not only that, the online ad train has already left the station over 10 years ago anyway. Why would any advertiser PAY to advertise on some newspaper web site when they can get free ads on craigslist, which has already achieved critical mass among buyers and sellers as the only place to go for hundreds of millions of buyers and sellers. Likewise, who needs local classifies when you can sell your stuff directly to the universe on ebay? And then there is google soaking up the rest of ad revenue.
Print publishers are dead and cannot be resurrected online, at least in terms of their former revenue level. And quite frankly, that’s a good thing as most of them are anti-American, Commie pieces of crap and deserve to die.