• Forbes.com, Thursday, March 22, 2007 11:30 AM

The newspaper business has apparently gotten so bad that it no longer pays attention to it. That's the conclusion reached by independent analyst John Morton and media economist Miles Groves, who are folding their well-respected Morton-Groves Newspaper Newsletter.

Morton, who has published about the industry since 1976, joined with Groves in 2002. "I'm getting tired of producing painful forecasts," he says. "Recently, as down as they get to be, they never seem to be down enough." More to the point, ongoing consolidation has cut deeply into the newsletter's subscription base.

"Our base is eroding," Groves says. "As those corporate jobs disappear, our subscriber base disappears." In addition, the regularly tallied financial data has gotten more difficult to come by as increasing numbers of papers are sold off to private owners.

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