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The Wall Street Journal published an article today about the increasingly rapid decline of newspaper circulation around the US. Citing a report from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the WSJ is now the largest paper in terms of circulation, and actually saw a slight rise in their numbers. Everyone else on the list dropped, and in some cases it was precipitous.

As many have pointed out, this is primarily due to the rise of Internet use for news, articles, etc. The big question, of course, is what happens to the newspapers? Do they simply move online and exist without the print infrastructure, or do they get torn apart completely by the niche content providers (i.e. blogs, etc.). If this were to happen, how do we replace the tried-and-true processes of a professionally run news organization with a loose federation of blogs and websites? Obviously I’m a huge fan of tech, the web, blogs, etc. but it’s painfully obvious that the vast majority of blogs simply don’t have the editorial capabilities of a newspaper.

It will be interesting to watch from the sidelines, but I suspect more bad news is in store for the papers before we turn the corner