“Their” when I meant “they’re,” the horror.

I actually have heard execs assure their audience that things will be OK once real estate climbs out of the gutter. But the message I see again and again in the real estate trade publications is unambiguous: Print newspaper advertising is obsolete. Just because the dollars came back to us after the previous boom-bust cycle doesn’t mean their coming back this time. Recruitment ring a bell, anyone?

If we want those dollars back, we’ll actually have to earn them this time.

I think there’s a bigger set of issues than year-to-year economic trends or even organizational sloth at the core of all this, especially as applied to major metros: suburbanization and post-industrialism.

Without getting all graduate-studenty about it, I would put it this way:

The idea that there is a static set of “readers” interested in “local news” about the city where a major metro happens to be physically located is an increasingly quaint one.

Couple that with the unbundling of media online, and you end up with a lot of overstaffed papers in medium-to-large cities with a readership that gets everything but local news somewhere else.

But, as I said, I agree that newspapers are paying a steep price for their sloth now. Things would be bad now if the economy was good. But it’s not. So the pain of our lack of innovation is made worse. It’s like the economy is kicking newspapers while they’re down.

Economics is largely about the action at the margins. Things were bad before the economy turned. Now they’re made worse by it. So, I would say your premise is more like “it’s not ONLY the economy, stupid.” Anyone who believes that all will be right as rain when the economy comes back are just what your title says: stupid.