Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing

But the papers weren’t selling the news. They were selling ads and charging a lot of money for them because of one thing only: they held an informal monopoly on a societal convention whereby they deposited those ads—around which they wrapped some reporting, some of it serious, some of it fluff—on subscribers’ driveways.

Part two:
The web doesn’t reward blandness. It doesn’t really like the obvious, the inoffensive and the established. In this way, the web mercilessly exposes the flaccidness of the content of most papers.

Insightful/anti-bullshit/must-read.