The decline, seen more dangerously in the West, is threatening the newspaper industry in other countries. In view of different patterns of evolution, development, role, socio-cultural-economic-political environments, the same yardsticks cannot hold true for all.

However, there are lessons to be learnt, especially in the new digital era which has thrown up challenges that are common to all - such as the dominating role of the internet and mass communication devices like the mobile phone. How the West copes up with these challenges is interesting to know. And, there lies the key to saving the newspapers. New challenges also present new opportunities.

Andre Schiffrin in his 'The Business of Words' (Navayana Publishing, New Delhi, 2011 edn), a combined edition of The Business of Books and Words & Money, discusses the future of newspapers in the United States and other countries. In a forthright comment, he says the newspapers are declining, citing the examples of the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun Times and San Francisco Chronicle.

It hurts: "Even relatively healthy papers are cutting enormous numbers of staff," he says citing LAT which cut 500 of 1,100 employees and SFC from 500 to 200. As a result, there is far less coverage of local state legislatures "an area of government known for its high level of corruption" (perhaps we should take heart that even in the US corruption is so much steeped in the local rungs of governance) where the press played the role of a critic and counterforce.

It is shocking to note that even the New York Times had problems after its price increase in 2009 and subsequently it had to retrench 200 people that helped it as a cost-cutting measure.

The decline in readership and fall in ad revenues are in part attributable to the advent of television and the internet.

News magazines like Time and Newsweek also lost readers, but one of the reasons was lack of content with more ads and fluff stuff filling the pages. The Economist, however, is stable because it has fuller information in its pages.

The ad effect also was visible in the electronic medium with evening news programmes in the US showing a decline in viewership due to increasing number of commercials. People do not want to be continually interrupted while viewing their favourite programmes.

French scenario: In France, leading newspapers Le Figaro and Le Monde too faced the heat with readership of the younger ones declining, a trend seen in the United States. While a similar pattern was discernible in the United Kingdom, there was less of a decline in Germany.

The Financial Times and The Telegraph are an exception and they made profits; the FT picked up more readers abroad like The Economist. The Evening Standard, a traditional tabloid, adopted a different strategy and it became a free newspaper; this more than doubled its circulation. The FT too faced a 40 pc decline in the first half of 2009, but it decided to charge online readers and it clicked with 117,000 subscribers paying $299 a year each.

While the declining trend for various reasons has been visible for long, newspaper owners and managements have not adopted a heads-on approach. Says Schiffrin: "What is astonishing is that this long-term decline should not have alarmed the press much sooner."

Cost-cutting by reducing staff - with journalists covering the local news facing the axe first - and coverage of news - local and foreign - is seen as a measure that is bound to lead to further fall in readership.

Asian situation: Newspapers in India and China are benefiting from the rise of a middle class and its income. Most of the Asian newspapers, however, are looking stable as of now.

The threat from the Internet is this: it garners more ads than readers of newspapers - 96 per cent of the time Americans devote to newspapers is spent reading their printed form. An American who is editing a paper in Singapore, said at the WAN-IFRA conference in Chennai in September 2011 (see my earlier blogs for more of that) that he was more comfortable reading the paper in the printed form as most do.

Schiffrin says younger readers, however, seem alienated from the traditional media and are more interested in social media such as the Facebook. They form the bulk of readership of the free newspapers that affect the circulation of paid newspapers.

So it all boils down to this: if they are to survive and continue to make profits, newspapers everywhere have to face new challenges with suitable strategies. These include leveraging their strengths; devising ways to retain younger readers by catering to their livelihood issues; revving up ad revenues from news sites; charging online readers for premium content; and resorting to free issues of at least sections of the newspaper in the worst scenario.