Just the facts, ma’am: 

* Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper publisher, said second–quarter profits plunged 36%. USA Today’s ad sales dropped 27% in June alone, and all Gannett publications, (including our very own ignoble Arizona Republic) fell 16% that same month. 

* Executives at the Hearst Corporation say that one of their biggest papers, The San Francisco Chronicle, is losing $1 million a week.

And there's more - so much more.

 * The McClatchy Company, owner of The Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star, The Sacramento Bee and others, announced last week that ad revenue was down 15.4 percent through the first five months of the year. The company will eliminate about 1,400 jobs, leaving it with 21% fewer employees than it had 18 months ago. 

* This month, The Los Angeles Times decided to eliminate 150 more newsroom jobs, and The Chicago Tribune said it would cut 80, while the other 12 papers also owned by the Tribune Company also suffered double-digit declines in advertising revenue. The Tribune’s management said its newspapers would print 12% fewer news pages and cut their news staffs accordingly. Another part of their solution - cosmetic changes to make the articles shorter, more colorful, and, in a pithy phrase, “easier to read.”

You don't have to be a financial analyst to know something is very wrong with the newspaper business. But what the hell - let’s hear from a couple anyway.

From The New York Times, (which has seen its stock slide to the extreme discontent of its stockholders): “Never in my most bearish dreams six months ago did I think we’d be talking about negative 15 percent numbers against weak comps,” said Peter S. Appert, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. “I think the probability is very high that there will be a number of examples of individual newspapers and newspaper companies that fall into a loss position. And I think it’s inevitable that there will be closures in this industry, and maybe bankruptcies.”

And more: “It’s going a lot worse than anybody predicted, and if we have double-digit ad declines for two years, some newspapers will be in real financial jeopardy,” said Edward Atorino, an analyst at the Benchmark Company. Even with less severe losses, “You’re going to see structural changes: papers could drop a day or two, they could outsource printing.”

 The Internet is replacing the newspaper business, and, the versatile beast that it is, it is also sucking the life out of television as well. This is not a casual matter, not a new technology besting the old, automatic shifts replacing manuals. The Internet changes everything. The Internet will change not only how we get our news, but what news we get. The Internet will change not only how news will distributed,but how we relate to one another as a community, as a nation.

 I’ve previously written about the power of the Internet and what it will do to all of us, and you can read it here, so I won’t repeat it. Putting aside the grander issues of national unity and the media, one thing is obvious: Like it or not, the days of the newspaper as a primary source of information and reason are numbered. It’s just simple, undeniable logic.

 Just today, Wired quoted Katharine Weymouth, the 42-year-old publisher of her family’s Washington Post, as saying, “The numbers suck in our business.” The numbers tell a simple tale, perhaps most colorfully explained by sportswriter Damon Runyon: “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.”