In this series, we take a look at the 25 stocks on the S&P 500 Index (SPX) that have turned in the worst performance during the past decade – what went wrong, and what happens next.

It's possible that you may have heard some rumors about the death of print media. As it turns out, they're more or less true. Not long after Al Gore invented the internet during the 2000 elections, readers began defecting from traditional print media toward internet-based alternatives. The immediacy and convenience of online publications have sucked the lifeblood -- and the ad revenue -- from traditional, more easily folded newspapers.

And, if you're looking for a company that's waist-deep in the print-periodicals business, look no further than Gannett Co. (NYSE: GCI). The Virginia-based outfit prints daily newspapers that are published around the country, spanning from USA Today to the Detroit Free Press to my own local fish-wrapper, The Cincinnati Enquirer.

What went wrong? At number 23 on our list of the S&P 500's worst 10-year laggards, GCI lost 70% of its value during the decade ended June 30, 2008. The stock peaked at $91.38 in April 2004, and its performance since then can best be described as "prolonged death throes." Sure, there were a few upbeat quarters mixed in, but the industry trend was (and is) inescapable. According to the Newspaper Association of America, circulation revenue has dropped consistently in the past five years. GCI's decline on the charts has been just as consistent; since June 2004, the stock's 10-month and 20-month moving averages have ushered the stock ever southward.

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.