In a post that’s curiously date-stamped 10 days in the future, BusinessWeek’s, Jon Fine asks if the San Francisco Chronicle will be the first major metro daily to give up the print ghost. I suggested much the same thing a few weeks ago, noting that the Chron’s decision to eviscerate its news staff amounted to committing suicide.

I’m not a media critic, but I’ve always been surprised at how awful the SF Chronicle is. It seems to me that a great city like San Francisco deserves a better paper, but the two dailies in that area seem to have ceded that title to the Mercury News down the peninsula. I can’t speak to the quality of the Chron’s website, but if, as Fine suggests, it’s a better product than the print edition, you have to wonder how much longer the Hearst Corp. will commit to producing an inferior product on paper when its audience is one of the most digitally hip and wired in the world. Why not pull the plug and invest in an online franchise that has the potential to dominate a lucrative market?

Eric Deggans of TampaBay.com points out the absurdity of newspapers’ coverage of their own struggles, noting that journals that aspire to complete truth and transparency obfuscate when it comes to documenting the layoffs and budget cuts that plague them today. He notes that the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and Tampa Tribune are among the Florida papers facing layoffs in markets where population growth is booming.

Editor & Publisher says: “United Press International is cutting 11 positions from its Washington, D.C., bureau, including its lone White House correspondent, Richard Tomkins. The move marks the first time in its history that UPI will have no one on that beat.”

That was Helen Thomas’ beat, remember? Maybe it’s just a reflection of the lack of news coming out of the current administration. Or the fact that fewer and fewer people care what goes on at the White House any more.

The Business magazine out of the UK reports that Rupert Murdoch has succeeded in his bid for Dow Jones, paying $5 billion for the world’s most prestigious business publisher.

It’s interesting that this deal was sidetracked over issues of editorial independence rather than price. Dow has always considered the integrity of the Journal‘s news operation to be a corporate jewel and that’s reassuring. Somewhat.

Still, you can’t ignore the Murdoch legacy. He turned the NY Post into a British tabloid-style scandal sheet whose outrageous headlines are still its best-known quality. Fox News’ right-leaning, sensationalist reporting makes a lot of people in the TV news business wince. The Times of London, another Murdoch acquisition, has never regained its reputation as one of the world’s great newspapers.

Of course, the Journal already has a conservative political bent and it has done the best of any national newspaper at keeping its editorial voice relevant to changing audience tastes. But you have to wonder what the paper will look like in five years.

The International Herald Tribune reports that Journal staffers are worried about layoffs, and well they should be, given the precipitous drop in business-to-business print advertising noted in the article. IBM’s magazine and newspaper ad spending fell from $144.6M in 2004 to under $37 million last year, the article notes, citing TNS Media Intelligence figures.

Fortunately, Dow Jones has been ahead of the pack in moving its ad business online. Media Post reports that online revenues now account for 30% of Dow Jones’ total sales. There’s no question that the Journal will survive the coming newspaper meltdown. The question is: in what form?

“The magnitude of the recent declines is extraordinary for a non-recession period and provides concrete evidence, in our view, that the share shift from print to online in the publishing industry is accelerating,” says analyst Peter Appert in a research note that sharply reduced earnings estimates for the newspaper industry as a whole and singled out McClatchy and NYTimes Co. as stocks to sell. The story appears in Editor & Publisher.

The analyst forecast it’ll be at least five years before online revenue equals print revenue in the industry. On a more positive note, he predicts, “Ultimately, we believe newspaper publishers will re-emerge as very healthy and dominant players in the local media marketplace.”

Let’s hope so, but the transition could take longer than five years, and the eventual leveling of revenues will be due as much to declines in print as to growth in online. Whatever form the transition takes, it’s going to be ugly and very painful.

Doug Frantz quits for a job at The Wall Street Journal just months after urging staffers to stay the course when the paper’s editor was fired for refusing to cut more jobs. That can’t be good for morale. The LA Times is still fighting back from its efforts to become The New York Times of the west coast in the 80s and 90s, a campaign that caused it to run ponderous stories that were irrelevant to the Latino audience that should have been its source of growth. This is a paper in serious trouble, while the Journal at least stands a chance of surviving the industry meltdown.

Alan Mutter gathers up the dismal earnings reports of the major newspaper companies and asks the tough question: how long can these businesses survive?

He writes:

“While everyone in the newspaper business acknowledges that the good old days are gone, few people viscerally understand how rapidly the industry is coming to the point that it cannot sustain itself without farther-reaching – and likely more wrenching – structural changes than such relatively modest efforts to date as scrapping stock tables, outsourcing telephone ad-takers or even down-sizing newsrooms by 50%.

“Absent plans to pare entrenched bureaucracy, eliminate archaic work rules and speedily implement bold strategic initiatives to build significant and sustainable new revenue streams, the industry could find itself on a hopelessly irreversible trajectory. If it isn’t there already.”

I asked much the same question in my essay, “How the Coming Newspaper Industry Collapse Will Reinvent Journalism” earlier this year. The point is that the economics of newspapering – with its high fixed cost – doesn’t scale down very well. At some point, it becomes impossible to meet operating expenses, and when that happens, the whole model collapses very quickly. We will barely know what hit us.

Alan Mutter writes perceptively on the recent plunge in newspaper revenues on his outstanding Reflections of a Newsosaur blog.

“Print advertising sales for newspapers appear to be on track to plunge by $2 billion this year, which would make for the worst performance in a decade other than the disastrous period following 9/11,” he writes, noting that this will be the first time newspaper revenues have ever declined in a time of economic prosperity.

First quarter revenues for classified advertising – the most profitable part of the newspaper business – were off a staggering 13.2% in the first quarter, Mutter notes. Automotive advertising, which is newspapers’ Rock of Gibraltar, was off nearly 13% last year. Nearly all of this business is going online and it’s not coming back.

I’ve characterized the scenario facing major metro dailies as a “death spiral” in my own writing on this topic. Alan Mutter’s statistics and analysis bear this out. In a spiral, the speed of descent increases as the object hurtles toward the ground. The numbers indicate that a spiral could be developing. According to Mutter, print advertising revenues were off .5% in 2005, 4.6% in 2006 and are on track to decline 6.4% in 2007. It’s too early to call this a pattern, but in an industry that Mutter notes “has been masterful at increasing its revenues in good times and bad,” this twist of fortune is unprecedented and alarming.

Desperate acts like the San Francisco Chronicle’s recent decision to eviscerate its newroom staff indicate that the industry is in panic mode. The Chron is basically committing hara-kiri rather than continuing the fight. I suspect it’s only the first of many to do so.

Mutter, a newspaper-editor-turned-entrepreneur, offers some historical context:

“In retrospect, it is clear that newspaper publishers were lulled into complacence in the early years of the Internet by their prior skill in achieving consistent sales growth in even negative economic conditions. But the growth was not achieved as much by recruiting new customers – or even selling more advertising to existing ones – as by using their monopoly-like positions to force hefty annual rate increases on advertisers who essentially had nowhere else to go.”

Monopolies thrive in the absence of competition, but they tend to let atrophy the skills needed to compete. Newspapers have almost no weapons with which to fight the online hordes that are devastating their business.

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