Many of the large newspaper chain purchases over the last several years have involved tremendous borrowing and the banks are at the door with eviction notices. Even the big companies in the industry are having trouble. According to The Wall Street Journal, Gannett, Inc. (NYSE:GCI) the country's largest newspaper publisher, said Wednesday it had tapped its credit line as short-term financing markets stall.

Several other chains, particularly McClatchy (NYSE:MNI) and Gatehouse (NYSE:GHS) are having crippling debt problems.

A number of media sources reported yesterday that the The Star Tribune in Minneapolis has missed a payment on its debt.

Although it is hard to imagine, some of these companies may fail and fail soon. The costs of newsprint, trucks, gas, and personnel are so great that a number of newspapers may complete shut down. Customers may wake up one morning and find the front step empty. The poor newspaper boy has lost his job.

It is a hard time when there is nothing to put in the bird cage.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

A piece in today's New York Times reports on the bleak outlook for the newspaper industry. Last year, brought the second-worst decline in ad revenue in more than 60 years, with only 2001, a recession, coming in worse.

Essentially, newspaper advertising broke its cyclical mold -- booming and fading with the broader economy. There was a substantial decline in 2007 unaccompanied by broader economic woes. Print circulation is down, and according to the Times online revenue can't make up the gap: "... for every dollar advertisers pay to reach a print reader, they pay about 5 cents, on average, to reach an Internet reader. Newspapers need to narrow that gap, but the rise in Internet revenue slowed sharply last year."

The problem for most newspapers is that they are finding themselves without much of a moat on the internet -- Being the major newspaper in a small city is very different from competing with literally everyone else for web traffic. News aggregators such as Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), and RSS feeds are probably killing newspapers.

Warren Buffett was once a big fan of small newspapers but unfortunately, all the reasons he liked them are no longer true: They don't have monopolies anymore. You can set up My Yahoo! to deliver you local news and there's just no reason to buy a newspaper for national news with the wealth of online resources available.

Newspapers aren't dead yet but they're definitely dying and I can't think of anything that could possibly reverse it.

Predictably, shares of the New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) are down more than 2% today after Bank of America put a "sell" rating on the newspaper publisher, citing a potential downturn in advertising from luxury advertisers and from financial services companies in New York and Boston.

Analyst Joe Arns slashed his price target by 33% to $21 as he believes the company's earnings before interest, taxes depreciation and amortizations could be 19% below Wall Street's consensus forecasts assuming a "mild recession," according to MarketWatch.

While I agree with Arns' analysis, like most analysts he is a day late and a dollar short. Wall Street has put a "sell" rating on the stock a long time ago. Shares of the New York-based publisher are down more than 33% for the year even though the company posted BETTER-THAN-EXPECTED third quarter results. The stock trades under the $19.50 median target of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

My hunch is that newspaper publishers are such a low priority for Wall Street firms that they could care less whether or not their ratings are the least bit timely.

Note: I have done freelance writing for the New York Times and Boston Globe.