People who care about their communities read newspapers, because that's where the news about their communities is. Good local newspapers aren’t about “national” and “international.” Internet advertising has been around now for 15 years or so. Guess what. It's not as good as newspaper advertising. And as it becomes more of a nuisance, it will get worse. Ask anyone in the marketing business. Internet advertising is a bother and a distraction, a lot like radio and TV advertising. The audience for any single website is a minute fractoidal slice of the market. And an advertiser’s spot might show up for every sixth or eighth or 10th surfer whose browser points to that page. Good newspaper advertising works great. Local business people know that. In fact, the advertising is one of the big reasons people buy newspapers. People in a town can be surfing any of 10 million websites. People in that same town read one or two of the same newspapers. If you were a local business person, where would you put your advertisement? Until internet advertising and its required hardware duplicate the welcome intrusion that newspaper advertising enjoys, we'll have newspapers, maybe not the newspapers we have now, but we'll have newspapers. There's money in it.

Internet advertising was completely meaningless 15 years ago, and is much less so today. Most of the advertising regular people do - garage sales, used cars, apartments for rent, help wanted, etc., are handled much more efficiently by websites than newspapers. I don't know what portion of revenue this type of advertising comprises, or how much it's dropped, but you can't deny that there is more to this than just the difference between a business ad in print and a business ad on a web page. And even print advertising loses its value as circulation drops. In 30 years, how many people are still going to want to read a physical newspaper?