Morgan Stanley publishing analyst Doug Arthur predicted that many recent ad revenue declines would prove transient and tied to one-time events -- a poor box office year at the movies, department store consolidations and fraudulently inflated newspaper circulations.
"I think the sun will shine again on advertising," said Arthur, whose brother John is an assistant managing editor at the Los Angeles Times.
"As a result, management may be overreacting with all these buyouts."
Others are less sanguine about the prospects for what they call a "mature" or "legacy" industry.
Independent analyst Harold L. Vogel said journalists needed to realize that the news would be delivered by different means in the future -- much as music and movies are migrating to online delivery.
"This is the same thing that happened to other legacy industries like the steel mills and textile industry," Vogel said. "The only difference in newspapers is everybody has a college education and can express themselves, so they can moan and groan and go on and on about it."
The newsroom budget cuts have aggravated the traditionally strained relations between journalists -- who say they need big budgets to seek out news on behalf of the public -- and executives on the business side, who preach cost cutting to serve shareholders and to keep their publications alive.
Tensions between the newsroom and the business side have bedeviled several Tribune Co. newspapers of late.
Citing pressure to cut newsroom costs, the top-ranking editors of both the Los Angeles Times and Newsday have quit in the last year. They were among many editors who said they couldn't cover their communities and the world with fewer reporters and editors.
Like most newspaper companies, Tribune has seen its stock slump this year -- by more than 20%. It closed Friday at $33.44, up 1 cent.
Some have contended that the best hope for preserving news gathering is to shift ownership away from publicly traded companies to private hands. One model is the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, operated by a private, nonprofit organization that contributes excess earnings to the Poynter Institute, a school for professional journalists.
But even the New York Times and the Washington Post, whose publicly traded stock is controlled by families known for investing in the newsroom during tough economic times, have not been immune to cost pressures.
