This article gets a lot right — the death of newspapers has been exaggerated. They still sell, though sales are falling, and they’re still profitable. The smart ones are becoming more profitable even as sales decline — in other words, they have a product that has been underpriced until now. What’s happening to the newspaper industry is not only a function of the Internet muscling in, though that’s a large part of it, but also the general fragmentation of media that has been going on since the introduction of cable television. There will still be newspapers for a long time to come; what there may or may not be are newspapers that can pose as national institutions. One reason the Wall Street Journal is beat its rivals is that, unlike USA Today or the New York Times, it doesn’t pretend to be a national everyman’s newspaper. The WSJ isn’t a mass-consumer product, it’s a niche product with a huge niche — businessmen. The paper focuses on giving that market value for its money. The New York Times, by contrast, is still catering to a general market that has been in decline for 20 years. The paper’s prestige held up sales against the centrifugal forces of the market for a time, but that clock has since run out. What the likes of USA Today and the NYT are going to have to do is find a large niche in which to specialize, but that runs hard against their institutional identities.