The newspaper, an enduring staple of American life, has never seemed more endangered.

After decades of declining circulation but relatively stable finances, the industry has been overwhelmed by the current recession and hit with an unprecedented and accelerating cycle of bad news - job cuts, closures, and bankruptcies.

The Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, for instance, filed for bankruptcy in February. The Minneapolis Star Tribune did so in January. Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Baltimore Sun, among others, sought court protection from debtors in December.

The Rocky Mountain News in Denver folded in February.

Even the New York Times Co., which reported a $74 million first-quarter loss, had threatened to close the Boston Globe, which it owns, unless the Globe's unions agreed to significant contract cuts.

Given all of that, casual readers can be forgiven for assuming that the final days of ink-on-paper journalism are here.

Well, don't cancel your subscription quite yet. There is a fairly wide collection of experts who remain bullish about newspapers. They point, in part, to the huge demand for news - 74 million people still read a paper daily, a similar number use a newspaper Web site each month. The New York Times Web site drew 16.5 million unique visitors last month.

Yes, daily print journalism, particularly as practiced at large metropolitan newspapers, seems to be moving toward its last paper editions, but that is still years, possibly decades, away, according to those observers.

What time remains, proponents say, will offer an opportunity to resolve the great dilemma now facing newspaper companies: how to make their Web sites financially viable. Despite a rapidly growing audience - almost 74 million unique monthly visitors in the first quarter - the nation's newspapers have been unable to earn substantial revenue from their Web sites. Last year, online ad revenue was $3.1 billion, less than a tenth of that produced by the paper product. And that figure was down 1.8 percent from 2007.

With that in mind, there is a growing push for newspapers to begin charging for online content, something now being championed by newspaper mogul Rupert Murdoch. The Wall Street Journal, which already charges for subscriptions to its online site, is planning to offer nonsubscribers the option of paying for individual articles.

And there is a hope that new technology - slimmer, easier-to-hold electronic-viewing devices such as Amazon's Kindle - will ease the transition from paper.

The transition won't be pretty, experts warn. Newspapers will be increasingly thinner, with smaller staffs and more narrowly focused content as resources are squeezed. And there remains a question of how much of what is lost will be replaced by online journalism.

"There is going to be wrenching change, and we are going to see more destruction - I'm a victim of that destruction," said John Temple, former editor of the Rocky Mountain News. "But better things can come out of this. This is a terribly exciting time."

For the forseeable future, print remains a financially viable vehicle for news.

"Paper is a pretty good technology," Walter Isaacson, former editor of Time magazine, said in an interview on CNBC's Wall Street Journal Report With Maria Bartiromo. "I think we need a mix of technology, and we will always need a mix of technology. . . . Print is just one of those technologies, but it is a pretty darn good one."

When considering the future of newspapers, it is important to remember that this is not the first time the industry has faced a wave of closures. From the late 1970s through 1990, for instance, there was a dramatic decline in the number of afternoon papers, as readership patterns changed. Among the victims was the Bulletin, which folded in 1982.

Also, it is not just newspapers struggling to hold their own in the evolving, increasingly fragmented news marketplace: Television news, both local and network, has suffered declining viewership. Surveys by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press have shown a steady slide in the percentage of people who said they watched television news. In 1993, for instance, 60 percent reported watching nightly network news. Last year, 29 percent said they did.

Still, there is no denying that newspapers have hit a particularly difficult patch - and not all of it related to the recession.

Total advertising revenue, for instance, has fallen in five of the last eight years. That is exactly the number of years it fell in the previous 50. Last year, it was down 18 percent, a record, according to the Newspaper Association of America. First-quarter ad revenue this year was projected to be down 25 percent to 30 percent, the worst drop ever.

Circulation also keeps sliding. The latest numbers show an across-the-board drop for the the nation's 25 largest papers. Almost half - including The Inquirer - saw declines in excess of 10 percent.