I do say the Internet is drawing blood, but the drop in display advertising resembles bludgeoning. When the economy buoys up, there will be fewer readers, and not as attractive ones, forcing ad rates to drop. That is due to the Internet, a harder blow than those from TV, radio and movies in their corresponding days of novelty. My guess is that print newspaper ads will be for the proverbial brick-and-mortar retailers, while ads on the Web component of newspapers will be for online shopping and online services.

But I still don’t understand our business model, staying as I do on the buggy whip quality control end. You cited classified advertising. That apparently brings in less revenue than reader subscriptions or single buys. To win the Little Rock newspaper war of the 1980s ending in 1991, you’ll recall that one key strategy of publisher Walter Hussman was to make nearly all classified ads — those not for businesses — free. He has kept them free after 1991, to this day. Evidently, the readers hunting for garage sales then thumb through the rest of the paper and heed display advertising, the big profit. Second, the classified sections of large daily newspapers — Dallas and St. Louis sorts of places — are small, given their overall population, and shrunk long before eBay drove doughnuts across the level playing field.

Further, the suffix of the scary Craigslist is dot-org — nearly all of its online ads are free, free to place and free to read. The few Craig charges for, pays for the rest and makes him and his relatively few employees rather well off. (This just in.) Classified sales of beat-up furniture have great power but not profit. This might be an example of how the theoretical Gift Economy explains the Internet while the Market Economy runs stores you drive to. But that doesn’t explain much at all: The two dudes who created the universally popular but revenue-less Twitter must be close to having to sleep in their cars.

But the Internet presents challenges unlike those already survived from TV, radio and so on. For one, the Internet hurts classified advertising, because online aggregation and search is better, faster, broader than local classifieds in print media. The Internet enables the combination of classifieds from print (online sources absorb print classifieds) but as people flock to eBay and craigslist or whatever, they stop placing local print classifieds in the first place. As I understand the business numbers, classifieds have basically been the profit margin of the newspaper industry during its long, slow fall. Everything else — advertising and circulation revenue, personnel and print costs — is a wash, a zero-sum game. These days, the plus side is much smaller, and the newspaper industry has lost its maneuvering room, if not its oxygen line.

As you have mentioned, though, it’s not so much the Internet itself as the already weakened condition of the patient that is the problem. Still, the new age also has changed the whole equation: the Internet means the consumer owns the production technology. “Newspapers” will move toward this consumer-held machinery because the single most expensive part of their continued operation is the printing press. And it is meant to carry information that can be gotten faster, fresher, more vividly (with images and sound) from other places.

As you say, advertisers don’t see results from this broad, fresh medium of the sort that they are used to from journalism’s customers of a slower time, and they don’t pay the same. It’s a vicious circle, because even when the economy rebounds and advertisers have disposable income again, newspapers won’t have the audience to be able to demand the rates they will need to generate the necessary income to keep polishing a product to attract enough readers to entice advertisers …

Something much different is going to have to arise, lest we start turning to something like the football bowl games: “The Tasty Catsup Neighborhood Times” or the “Stinkin’ Ale Smalltown News.” Unless readers decide they will pay “blow your nose” money for reports on the local street improvements or that they will support something along the lines of PBS for newspapers (print or digital), we’re going to find out what democracy is like in the dark.