If it takes a good man to admit when he's wrong, then I'm up there.

My error: the speed of the decline of print newspapers. They're not dropping slowly: they're dropping like flies. And the metro dailies appear to be among the weakest: Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver. Who's next?

A journalism colleague called from Washington, D.C.: his reporter sister was laid off in Denver, whose ex-college roommate, the editor, got the axe in Seattle, and on and on it goes.

The big error in news/editorial conference rooms (and in this space, I might add): the failure to anticipate the speed of the decline of revenue. It's crumbling, due to the internet and the pronounced recession. (And here's hoping it's just a pronounced recession.) The online operations of many print dailies are doing OK-to-good, but the problem is they've started from such a low base and the ad market has become so fragmented/dispersed on the web that the web sites can't increase revenue fast enough to support the increasing losses from the print daily. The solution? Obviously, stop the print bleeding. In other words, shut down the print newspaper. And down they go. It is so sad. As noted earlier, some print dailies will survive with niches/specialization, but their overall operations will be smaller, due to the considerably lower gross annual revenue (at least initially) on the web.