City newspapers are in trouble. Several cities lost their dailies and many more have declared bankruptcy. The main reason is that newspapers are no longer the dominant way people get news, and their revenues suffer greatly as a result.

According to this interesting Wall Street Journal article, however, this is not the first time. In fact, newspapers around the country have had to reinvent themselves several times in the last 60 years. According to this piece, and to a new biography of the Wall Street Journal’s Bernard Kilgore by Richard Tofel, Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal and the Invention of Modern Journalism, Kilgore was a pioneer in the rebirth of Newspapers in the 40s and later on.

For instance, the Journal notes:

When Kilgore became managing editor of the Journal in 1941, he inherited a business model that technology had undermined. Founded in 1889 to provide market news and stock prices to individual investors, the Journal lost half its circulation as this basic information became widely available.
Kilgore observed that then new media such as radio meant market news was available in real time. Some cities had a dozen newspapers that had gained the Journal’s once-valuable ability to report share prices.
The Journal had to change. Technology increasingly meant readers would know the basic facts of news as it happened. He announced, “It doesn’t have to have happened yesterday to be news,” and said that people were more interested in what would happen tomorrow. He crafted the front page “What’s News — ” column to summarize what had happened, but focused on explaining what the news meant.
On the morning after Pearl Harbor, other newspapers recounted the facts already known to all the day before through radio. The Journal’s page-one story instead began, “War with Japan means industrial revolution in the United States.” It outlined the implications for the economy, industry and commodity and financial markets.
Kilgore led the Journal’s circulation to one million by the 1960s from 33,000 in the 1940s by adapting the newspaper to a role reflecting how people used different media for news. His rallying cry was, “The easiest thing in the world for a reader to do is to stop reading.”

The newspapers who managed the transition survived, the ones who didn’t disappeared. Read the whole thing here.

See also this good article by Michael Kinsley — someone I rarely quote.