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Web sites, those ventures aren't bringing enough revenues to offset the drop in their take from their print assets. In 20008 the Times suffered a $268 million drop in advertising revenue, a 13 percent fall over 2007. For a time the Times also dabbled with paid subscriptions on its Web site for its columnists like Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman and Paul Krugman, but gave up on that model shortly after.

The economic downturn in the newspaper industry comes at a time when the Internet has been making inroads on print advertising. But the escalating drop in ad revenue started several years before as merchandisers shifted their spending from the print medium to the Internet, where they can realize lower costs amid a growing audience that is increasingly getting its news online.

As the Columbia Journalism Review points out, " A world of news innovation is emerging online, both inside and outside of mainstream media. A recession looms like an iceberg but under the waterline is something unknown, a great restructuring of the way people get their news and information."

The newspaper is becoming old news. By the time it is published the real news has already been blogged, tweeted, Youtubed, Myspaced, Facebooked or Linkedin. Its now Real Time Live or die! Television is adapting to the reality of the Internet employing its features as well as its social networks: CNN regularly features live reports from Twitter, Myspace, Facebook and Skype.

Yet no one knows how this will end, or how it will affect news reporting. In its December 30, 2008 opinion page, the New York Times pointed to several concerns it had with the Internet model now in ascendance: that not much local news will be reported on the Web; local government will escape scrutiny; less coverage of loopholes in Connecticut's campaign financing law.

But for now, notwithstanding McLuhan, the medium is no longer the message.

Learn more about this author, Colin Dennis.
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