To compound matters, his release was a developing story full of off-the-record sources revealing information well before the release was made public and official the next day. Web sites were updated with supplemental news as quickly as it came in, meaning the local newspaper wasn’t only scooped by ESPN.com, a national news outlet—it was printing day-old information.

The Internet age has presented fresh challenges to an industry already fighting a war on a recessive, economic front. Newspaper revenue, which stems from advertising sales, is directly proportional to a publication’s circulation. When readership goes down, so does the revenue, so does the size of the staff, and so does the quality of reporting.

It would appear, then, that amidst unprecedented layoffs and budgets cuts, newspapers are becoming more and more obsolete.

The Cincinnati &Kentucky Post newspapers, for example, closed in 2006 after 126 years of print, The Rocky Mountain News published its final paper in February 2009 just shy of its 150 anniversary, and The Fort Worth Star-Telegram recently announced additional budget cuts and layoffs, citing advertising revenues as the culprit.

Still, 40 percent of Americans read a newspaper, according to a Pew Research Center for the People & the Press report released in 2006. Those numbers are down from 71 percent in 1965.

While the future of newspapers may look bleak, these tough times are forcing the print industry to overhaul its publication’s revenue stream.

Among those overhaul options is making it possible for newspapers to register as nonprofits. Senator Ben Cardin, D-Maryland, proposed the Newspaper Revitalization Act that would grant a nonprofit status to newspapers. Or, like the French counterpart, the American newspaper industry could look toward the government for a bailout.

Of course, nonprofits and newspaper bailouts aren’t without their critics.

Washington Post columnist, Adam Ross, said newspapers that appear all too chummy with their government aren’t as trustworthy as independent business models and would ultimately result in backlash, thereby hurting the very industry the bailout was intended to help.

“A reliance on government subsidies undermines the independence that gives media organizations their authority,” Ross wrote. “Readers aren’t likely to trust a newspaper that seems to be in bed with the government.”

Still other methods call for limiting the availability of news on any given news Web site. Instead of providing a free online news buffet, some syndicates are looking at charging readers a subscription cost, thereby requiring visitors to log-in for their news.

The Web site InDenverTimes.com, whose staff is made up primarily of former Rocky Mountain News journalists, intends to provide free online news content to all visitors, paid for by 50,000 subscribers who will get additional functionality at $4.99 a month.

“Journalism is not free, it’s expensive. Good journalism is very expensive and we need the people of this community to be vested behind this idea, and to help pay for that quality journalism,” Kevin Preblud, InDenver Times employee, told theDenverchannel.com.

The InDenverTimes.com appears to be onto something. While newspaper readership might be down, it isn’t the result of an uninterested population. Rather, the newspaper industry’s problem might be found in the very name—newspaper.

Jack Meyers thinks so anyway. Should newspapers have focused more on “news” than “papers,” he argues, they would have rightfully invested in the digital revolution early on.

“But they didn’t and now, for the most part, they are just one of many competitors with little unique differentiation and a weak business model,” Meyers wrote in, Is There a Future to Journalism?

While a national market might not be the best for newspapers to compete in, some experts predict that a newspaper’s community, and the localization of news, will ultimately save them.

Thoughts?