The latest numbers released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations have some good news for a handful of daily papers, including the P-I, but the data is bleak for the industry as a whole.

Overall, the nation's major metro dailies saw an average decline in circulation of 3.6 percent during the six months ending March 31. Some saw much steeper declines: The Dallas Morning News reporting a 10.6 percent drop. Among the nation's top 20 newspapers, only USA Today and The Wall Street Journal posted circulation increases -- of 0.3 percent and 0.4 percent, respectively. The P-I's weekday circ is up 1.2 percent and the Times is up 0.5 percent, but our combined Sunday paper is actually down 3.4 percent.

On a related note, Advertising Age has started a timely series on "The Newspaper Death Watch", which promisese to focus not on what ails us but what the industry's thought leaders are doing to find a remedy by developing new business models. It begins, however, by laying out the facts of the current mediascape in very brutal terms:

"There is no solution, given the advances of digital marketing and the changes in digital reading, that is going to save the newspaper industry as it is," said Ken Doctor, an industry veteran now serving as a media analyst for OutSell, the research and advisory firm. "There's an acknowledgement that they've been resistant to make," he said. "The industry as it has been is not coming back. It's going to be a radically different industry, especially for content creation and sales."

This process is not reversible, said Lauren Rich Fine, a former Merrill Lynch newspaper analyst now serving as a practitioner in residence at Kent State University's College of Communication and Information. "I wouldn't count on this industry becoming that profitable again," she said. "Anybody who thinks it's going back to the way it was is insane."

The newspaper industry, that is, must say goodbye to the double-digit profit margins that made it the darling of Wall Street, to its old unsurpassed authority, to its central place in American conversation and commerce.

John Morton, one of the most oft-quoted newspaper industry analysts, makes similar points in a commentary for American Journalism Review. His main thrust is that newspaper publishers' current belt-tightening, although a seemingly reasonable response to economic difficulty, is wrong-headed because it presumes an eventual recovery; i.e, a return to the way things were:

If newspapers hope to survive the Internet transformation, in which their brand name and reputation will be paramount to success, they must stop the ax-wielding and accept that the era of exceptional profitability is over. Or should be.

Ad Age also cites a recent study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which nailed the core business challenge much more succinctly: the "decoupling of news and advertising." In other words, declining audience -- and the declining influence that goes with it -- is actually just a symptom.