Quietly, while many in the news media where mourning the Rocky and speculating about which paper would be next, Hearst's newspaper division has been making some of its own news. First was their threat to close the San Francisco Chronicle, which has been disastrously losing money at least since Hearst paid some $50 million to "sell" their flagship, the Examiner.

Saturday morning I got up and there were two newspapers on the deck, the Miami Herald and the New York Times. But 450,000 people in Denver didn't get their regular paper that day since Friday was the last edition of the Rocky Mountain News, a paper nearly 150 years old.

Subscribers got the Denver Post instead, which is a good enough paper I suppose. Certainly better than it was a few years ago, before Dean Singleton decided to make it the flagship of his Media News Group.

Google has 81 million results for the search, "saving the newspaper industry," which may be part of the problem. (Favorite Google link: "Can French Teenagers Save the Newspaper Industry?")

Everyone has an idea of how to save the business, but the problem is that we are still thinking of it as an industry like automobiles or real estate development—all now whining for bailouts.