Basically, the problem is that newspapers make most of their money on ads from "bundled" content, e.g. lifestyle, cars, sport, and almost no money on hard news.
But today people go to specialized web sites for all the economically lucrative content, leaving only the hard news for the newspaper. And the newspapers can't really get people to pay for it, because most news stories are a commodity (it is the same story everywhere).
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/05/google-p...
Basically, the problem is that newspapers make most of their money on ads from "bundled" content, e.g. lifestyle, cars, sport, and almost no money on hard news.
But today people go to specialized web sites for all the economically lucrative content, leaving only the hard news for the newspaper. And the newspapers can't really get people to pay for it, because most news stories are a commodity (it is the same story everywhere).