Hopefully it will be used for something other than a newspaper. Business Week asks, "Which major American newspaper should be the first to throw up its hands and stop publishing a print product?"

It's a question worth asking. This could be the worst year for newspapers since the Great Depression. The double-digit revenue declines long forecast by doomsters have arrived. While nearly all the major papers still post profits, albeit smaller than before, a few prominent ones are losing boatloads. At Hearst Newspapers' San Francisco Chronicle, according to a deposition given by James M. Asher, the company's chief legal and business development officer, losses of $330 million piled up between mid-2000 and September, 2006, better—or should I say worse?—than $1 million a week. During negotiations with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's unions, the owning Block family disclosed that the paper lost $20 million in 2006. Late last year, The Boston Globe was headed for unprofitability as well, according to The Wall Street Journal.

And 2007 does not look materially kinder than 2006 for any of these papers. One senior executive describes the climate like this: "If you told me 24 months ago that revenues would be declining as much as they are today, I'd say you were smoking dope." Print newspapers require maintaining a costly status quo—paper, presses, trucks, and mail rooms—that, if only through rising gas prices, will only get more expensive.

WHEN, EXACTLY, do you junk something that no longer works? And which major paper should go first—not today, but within the next 18 or 24 months?

San Francisco Chronicle, I'm looking at you.

Read the whole thing, as the media's Red Queen's Race marches on. Note also though that if the Chronicle actually does go online-only, it will be for purely business reasons, I believe: San Francisco's shrinking population base and easy broadband access. There aren't enough conservatives left in SF for bias to play a significant reason for the paper's demise. While that's a testament to San Francisco's poor governance (including crime and out-of-control feral homeless), I can't fault the Chronicle for pandering its biases to its remaining audience.

Obligatory New Media Exit Question: Will going online-only save newspapers, or is it merely a rest stop on the way to 2014?

(Via NRO's Media Blog.)