@fu Newspapers were in decline in the US before the Internet was publicly available. Things were so bad that a law passed allowing papers in certain large cities to consolidate their back-end operations with their competitors as long as the editorial and marketing remained separate.

And where those weren't approved, Major cities became single-paper towns.

Example: in 1984, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner closed, leaving the Los Angeles Times as the sole large paper. LAT became the most profitable paper in the country for a few years, as it got all the advertising funds that would have been split across papers.