Quick Take: The Sadness of Clean Fingers

Just when you thought that the print media industry had been roughed up enough on the wrong side of the velvet rope, along comes the bouncer to lend a few more blows.

A few morsels of bad news that emerged over the weekend:

• The Pulitzer Prize-winning Albuquerque Tribune  closed shop after Saturday's paper. The E.W. Scripps (NYSE: SSP  ) newspaper had been around since 1922. However, circulation had dropped to less than a quarter of where it was 20 years ago.
• Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX  ) Time Inc. magazine arm will lay off more of its workers this quarter.
• Deutsche Bank downgraded shares of New York Times (NYSE: NYT  ) to sell.

In sum, it's a dim prognosis. Papers are closing down. Magazines are scaling back. And as battered as shares of print media moguls appear, analysts apparently feel that they are still overvalued.

The troubling aspect of this is that you can't blame the companies for falling asleep at the wheel. Old media companies have learned new media tricks. Whether it's a matter of joining Yahoo!'s (Nasdaq: YHOO  ) consortium of local papers bonding together for classified listings or monetizing their online pages through Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG  ) AdSense, they aren't fading away in delusional ignorance.

They're fighting. They're just not landing punches. I wonder if my children will grow up to forget what it was like to have the soft smears of ink on their hands as they consume the morning news. Who knew that clean hands would be the grim result of such dirty deeds?

More coverage of old media on our new media:

• Four publishers, including the New York Times, band together online.
• What will Time Warner do with AOL?
• Clear Channel is anything but.