I think up until the 1990s...when AM talk radio came along, with the emergence of the internet....the newspaper crowd thought that they could survive on with just the competition of TV.
But along came Rush....the suggestion that various news pieces were faked-up and fed throughout the nation...that started the downfall. Then the internet just clobbered the remainder of trust that newspapers had. My regional paper where I grew up as a kid....went several years ago to three productions per week. They probably can survive at that rate, but if you asked people if they read the local paper....it’s probably less than twenty-percent now.
I’ll predict by 2030...the bulk of remaining newspapers only print in digital form, and probably three to four times a week. If you were smart, you’d gear your whole paper to local news, local crime, and local people. It’s like chatter on Friday night high-school games....there ought to be two whole pages in a local paper covering the dozen regional teams and their players.
The smartphone killed the newspapers because you could bring it into the john for your morning duties - and get a lot more news. I honestly haven’t picked up a paper since the smartphone, for that very reason.