So what is there to be optimistic about?

Well, those are big declines, but against big numbers.

For instance, readership, while slipping, still remains high - more than 74 million people had read a paper daily as recently as 2007, according to Scarborough Research.

And last year, newspapers generated almost $35 billion in ad revenue. Even struggling papers bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. In 2008, for instance, The Inquirer generated $398 million.

The vast majority of the nation's midsize to small papers are actually doing quite well, according to industry analyst John Morton, with most earning profit margins still close to 10 percent.

The trouble is among the upper-tier, big-city newspapers, which have been hardest hit by the loss of classified revenue. While all are suffering, those struggling the most, Morton said, fall generally into two categories: second papers in two-paper towns (like the Rocky Mountain News) and papers recently purchased in highly leveraged deals (The Inquirer and Daily News, and those owned by the Tribune Co.).

It is the latter group that makes up most of the papers now in bankruptcy. Except for payments needed to cover their debt, many of these papers would be still showing a profit. The Inquirer, for instance, had a positive cash flow of $36 million - but for the funds needed to cover payments on nearly $300 million of debt.

The problems at all papers have been exacerbated by the unexpected, and in some ways unprecedented, economic collapse of the last year.

"It has been a trifecta - the auto-industry collapse, real estate collapse, and the credit crunch," said Ed Atorino, a media analyst with the Benchmark Co.

Atorino and Morton predicted a bounce in advertising revenue once the economy has righted itself.

The biggest bump might be expected in retail and other local display advertising, as well as national advertising. Classified ads, which have migrated heavily to the Internet, are expected to remain soft for newspapers.

"In all past recessions, in the recovery year, newspapers were able to recapture all of the ad revenue they had lost," Morton said. "This time, a significant amount of ads, particularly classified ads, won't be coming back."

Which will only intensify the pressures on papers to cut costs.

"Going forward, papers are going to be skinnier, with smaller staffs," Atorino said. "They will have to be more targeted. They might be published less than seven days a week."

While all those changes are money-savers, they also serve to make papers less attractive to consumers. Cutting back, which always means fewer reporters and editors and fewer pages of news, diminishes overall quality and gives customers another reason to stop buying or subscribing.

"The trend is clear: Readers have already been migrating from paper to online," said Ken Doctor, a media analyst for the research firm Outsell. "Newspapers only accelerate that trend when they cut back."

What remains troublesome, however, is the inability, thus far, for newspaper Web sites to generate significant revenue.

"There just isn't a business model in place that will come anywhere close to supporting the number of reporters and editors we have seen in major American cities," Doctor said.

Online advertising had been seen as a hoped-for savior, but thus far has fallen short. To make matters worse, after four years of 26 percent to 32 percent gains, the category took an 18 percent drop last year.

This has prompted a drive to find new ways to generate revenue from the journalism that now appears free on newspapers' Web sites.