Yet another shoe fell in the newspaper industry today as The Christian Science Monitor announced plans to switch from a daily to weekly format in April of 2009. More tellingly, the paper will focus most of its energy on growing its website, CSMontior.com, according to Mediapost.com.

The Monitor is coming late to a party already in full swing at papers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, at television news networks, and on sites sprung from the loins of e-businesses such as AOL. And like so many of the traditional lions of print journalism, the CSM is sitting on a stable of experienced and polished writers, too many for one weekly magazine, so layoffs are expected. By focusing on the web with 24/7 coverage updates, it obviously hopes to keep the best of its staff working. However, few except the WSJ have been able to make a subscription-based service work, and advertising alone probably won't cover the wages of those top-notch reporters.

The Monitor has been bleeding money, with $18.9 million in losses last year, according to Business Week. Circulation, which peaked at 223,000 in 1970, is down to 56,000. Even worse, less than 10% of its print revenues comes from advertising.

Because the newspaper is owned by the Christian Science Church, it may not have always danced to Mammon's tune like Rupert Murdoch, but even it cannot long ignore the lack of readers. Given its narrow market, lack of media partners, and late entry to the game, to succeed the Monitor will need some help from above.

And I mean even further above than Rupert Murdoch.

In a sign that the newspaper industry's problems are accelerating, Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI), the largest newspaper chain in the U.S., posted awful numbers for April. The information makes it more likely that the stocks of smaller paper companies like The McClatchy Company (NYSE: MNI) will take a dive over the next several weeks.

GCI revenues for the period ended May 4, 2008 declined 7.7 % compared with the same period in 2007. Revenue in the big publishing division fell almost 11%. Real estate classifieds fell almost 24% as home sales in most regions fell apart.

According to Gannett "At USA TODAY, advertising revenues were down 6.4%." As odd as it may seem, falling revenue is not the industry's single biggest problem because most companies like Gannett still have good profits. However, falling operating cash flow is killing companies that took on debt over the last decade to buy other newspapers in the hope of building scale and cutting costs. McClatchy has over $2.4 billion in debt after buying rival Knight-Ridder.

Banks may end up owning some of the newspaper chains.

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.

You have to stand in awe of the print media's desperation to reverse its decline. Having realized that newspaper circulation is destined to decline indefinitely, they've found a new way to report growth: Change the way you report your numbers! According (subscription required) to The Wall Street Journal:

Circulation at the nation's biggest newspapers slid again in the latest six-month period, by an average of 2.6%, a sign of continuing defection of readers and advertisers to the Internet.

But in an attempt to draw attention away from the sagging circulation data, the industry is trying to highlight a new measure: the total number of online and print newspaper readers instead of simply the number of print papers delivered everyday.

But the advertising industry isn't buying it: "This is helpful information, but we can't just rely on readership and audience," said Merle Davidson, director of Media Services at J.C. Penney Co. "Print circulation is still very important."

Of course it is. That's because newspapers that trumpet their online readership are competing in a whole different space -- against websites, including BloggingStocks.

The industry has essentially changed its "accounting" to try to portray the state of the business in a different light. If this sounds like what some of the great accounting frauds did, that's because it is.

Of course, this isn't fraud, because everything is disclosed. It's just desperation.