Newspapers are cutting back. Newsroom layoffs are widespread. News space has shrunk as newspapers consolidate sections and eliminate customary features. Circulation, on the wane since the late 1980s, is being deliberately reduced to eliminate unprofitable delivery in areas far from core markets...

Can newspapers really expect to recapture what they have lost with less circulation, a thinner newspaper offering fewer services to readers, with editorial products undermined in breadth and depth by layoffs and space constrictions? I think not.

He observes that newspapers are trying to transform for a future online, but he argues that a successful Internet-print future may be a long time in coming.

And if newspapers embark on this future with lesser journalistic products, less circulation, less standing in their markets, the profits of the future likely will be much less than newspapers are accustomed to.

I will point out that despite weak advertising and all the other woes newspapers endured last year, the average operating profit margin of the publicly owned companies' newspaper operations was 17 percent. Most non-media businesses couldn't hope to achieve even half that in the best of times.

A good chunk of those profits came, you guessed it, from cost-cutting, with inevitable damage to newspapers' standing in their markets. If newspapers hope to survive the Internet transformation, in which their brand name and reputation will be paramount to success, they must stop the ax-wielding and accept that the era of exceptional profitability is over. Or should be.