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Have seen this thread a bunch, and it’s good, but I think it underplays why newspapers were so powerful and why they were doomed. Leveraging up in the 90s and being slow to innovate didn’t help, but their fate was determined by technological changes and not managerial decisions.
Have posted this a bunch but Warren Buffett talked about the seismic change in the business proposition of newspapers, in 1991. Already newspaper hold on attention was weakening. 
In 2006, Buffett returns to the subject. First joking about the publisher who said “I owe my fortune to two great American institutions: monopoly and nepotism”.
From the same 2006 letter, Buffett offers the clearest insight into the deterministic nature of newspapers fate:
“Simply put, if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed.”
“Simply put, if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed.”
No one has done a better job of explaining why the Internet was so deadly to newspapers than @benthompson. It broke the model full stop.
This comes across as harsh, but it’s not moralistic, just the facts:
“Newspapers made money in the past not by providing societal value, but by having quasi-monopolistic control of print advertising in their geographic area”
“Newspapers made money in the past not by providing societal value, but by having quasi-monopolistic control of print advertising in their geographic area”
Have thought increasingly about this idea of corporate determinism. We fixate on the individual decisions managers make, but often it’s the case that in the end it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes there is no effective strategy at all.
To that point, it’s the internet that did it. Google and Facebook are the vessels, but it’s the internet that killed the local monopolies. And short of pulling the plug in Ashburn, there’s nothing that could stop it.
"While I know a lot of journalists disagree, I don’t think Facebook or Google did anything untoward: what happened to publishers was that the Internet made their business models — both print advertising and digital advertising — fundamentally unviable"
