Declining North American newspaper readership and ad revenues are not a new phenomenon, but the economic downturn has dealt an additional blow to the already-struggling industry — and there's more dire news likely to come, according to print industry leaders.

"There's no mystery: they're dying," Gary Kamiya, co-founder, former executive editor and writer-at-large of Salon.com, said in a discussion on CBC Radio's Q on Tuesday.

'"The death of newspapers means the death of reporting. There's been no business model that's been created so far that allows reporting online to be sustainable in a financial way.'—Gary Kamiya, co-founder Salon.com

Amid the ongoing job losses reported in countless employment sectors, there have been an increasing number of media layoffs, plunging profit revelations and newspaper closures affecting outlets in Canada and the U.S.

South of the border, examples include the Christian Science Monitor ending its print edition, the Washington Post announcing that its fourth-quarter profit plunged 77 per cent, more than 30 U.S. dailies seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection since January, plus the closure of Denver's Rocky Mountain News.

Meanwhile, in Canada, job cuts have affected media giants Torstar, Canwest, Sun Media, CTVglobemedia, Transcontinental and independents like the Chronicle Herald in Halifax.

"The death of newspapers means the death of reporting. There's been no business model that's been created so far that allows reporting online to be sustainable in a financial way," Kamiya said from San Francisco.

Toronto Star publisher John Cruickshank, former publisher of CBC News, pointed to the large debt carried by many U.S. newspaper firms, as well as Canadian media company Canwest, as a fundamental problem.

Need to create value in mix of media

With even the venerable New York Times struggling to make a profit, what every print outlet is racing toward is "how we can find a new mix of news on several different media and to create a model there," said Cruickshank, speaking from Q 's Toronto studio.

While the print industry might have to face producing newspapers for a smaller market, companies must also create online products that people will value, read and pay for, he said.

Despite sites like CBC.ca and Thestar.com having "millions of unique viewers each month," he agreed with Kamiya that news outlets still haven't figured out how to be profitable "on the 'net, yet."

Subsidizing newspapers is one option, though Kamiya pointed out that to sustain the current operations of the New York Times, it's estimated that the paper would need an endowment of approximately $5 billion US.

While Cruickshank said he feels a publicly subsidized newspaper might work because there are people willing to pay for investigative and conventional reporting, he specified that the industry must also pay attention to the audience's changing definition of news.

"The issue, it seems to me, is not so much 'Do people want newspapers?' as 'Do they want news?' and 'What's the definition of the news they want?' That's changed really remarkably over the last decade."

Tough times ahead

"Newspapers are floundering desperately around and they're searching for new ways out [of the current crisis]. I don't think they've found them yet," Kamiya said.

"[However,] the thought of the gallows concentrates the mind wonderfully and I think you're going to see a lot of changes in the newspaper industry. We don't know what they'll be yet."

Cruickshank predicted there will be more bad news before the eventual good.

"We're gonna see fallout of the sort that we saw when television entered the market and killed, what, about half the newspapers in North America," he said.

"We're living through a period of creative destruction. We did with the advent of television and the end of afternoon newspapers, evening newspapers," Cruickshank said, adding however that, "There will be new forms that evolve as a result and I think, ultimately, that people will be well served by them."