Breaking news: legacy media fights for its life.

• Author: Warren, Larry
• Position: On the Cover

American newspapers, Utah's included, are facing their hardest times since Gutenberg invented moveable type. When you think of the process of putting out a newspaper in the digital age, it does look archaic. Loggers cut down trees, which are trucked to a pulp mill and turned into truck-sized rolls of paper.

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The paper has to be hauled to every community press to be rolled across ink covered printing plates and assembled into finished newspapers. Then trucks haul them to neighborhoods and kids and adults hand carry or drive them to each individual doorstep.

Local television stations distribute their content by hurling electrons from broadcast towers atop mountains, or through cables strung to every home or by bouncing their signals off of satellites. And where viewers used to be able to count all the available TV signals on one hand, some cable and satellite channels are now numbered into the 800s.

Radio stations also face proliferating channels, both free and subscription based, which promise an ever-widening selection of narrowing content. "Broad" casting is yesterdays news. Now it's "narrow" casting and everyone is searching for their place in the spectrum.

"Legacy" media, which are traditional means of communication that existed before the Internet--broadcast and cable television, radio and newspapers--are nearing old age. Even television is approaching its 60s, and it's the youngest in that group. Profits are falling, staffs are being cut and everyone is searching for a new business model in a world where on a weekly basis, digital forms of information distribution seem to spawn new delivery platforms.

NBC Entertainment Co-chairman Marc Graboff told an industry conference this spring "No one really knows where [media is] going," and questioned how much longer there could be four networks programming 22 hours each, seven days a week.

In radio, station managers are replacing employees with new technology and developing Internet sites, which can expand their reach beyond the Salt Lake Valley.

As for Utah's top two newspapers, The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News, both are beefing up their online editions and making steep staff cuts. And that's the good news. Those moves are designed to keep these newspapers in business a little longer, since in other cities, a time-tested publication seems to go down about every week. From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to the Rocky Mountain News to the Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe, major newspapers are teetering on or going into bankruptcy. Too big to fail? Not anymore. Major newspapers are becoming the Chryslers and GMs of media.

"I think we'll be printing and delivering...