Keep in mind that this is one data point in a long series.<p>The Christian Science Monitor, once one of the highest-quality newspapers in America, went full digital a few years ago. The New Orleans Times Picayune, like many local and regional papers, now prints only a few days a week. The New York Times and others have shrunk their print editions from the former, larger &quot;broadsheet&quot; format. The Financial Times published its &quot;sunset&quot; plan for exiting print a few years ago. The list goes on and on.<p>(In the case of The Independent, it was previously rescued by the Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev. Like Facebook mogul Chris Hughes and his New Republic debacle, he found that the easiest way to become a millionaire in the news business is to start out as a billionaire...)<p>Print newspapers of a certain size are still a profitable business, if decreasingly so. While digital versions of those publications are the future, traditional media companies have largely fumbled that future, and they have been fumbling it since the mid-1990s.<p>Now they float in an ocean of free content produced by smaller newsrooms and full of aggregators cribbing their hard-won investigative pieces for the price of an intern. Some of that free content is coming from news organizations that are attached to a more profitable business than selling ads. Verizon&#x27;s media properties come to mind. Bloomberg LP makes its money selling monthly terminal subscriptions to financial data. You could say that Mike Bloomberg&#x27;s greatest act of philanthropy has been to subsidize Bloomberg News.<p>Newspapers were slow to recognize the decline to their advertising engine, and largely inept at responding to it. Many of them, including SF&#x27;s tech blogs, are limping along as events organizers that happen to publish daily updates.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of room to experiment in plugging news machines into other business models. The thing to keep in mind, as we do so, is that those publications will usually fail to cover one topic fairly: their owners.