Newspapers: What will happen with Newspapers?

This is a question I have been thinking about for a while and recently attended two newspaper conferences in US NAA and NNA both have a different audience. NAA is attended more by national newspapers and big publishing houses where as NNA is very mom and pop based small newspapers, daily, weeklies.

The average age of people running these small papers is 65+ and everyone is trying to see what can they do to increase the circulations and get more advertisers, lot of them have websites now but they have not bought into that yet. They are being either handled by the publishing houses they work under or other third party hosting providers but I don't think they believe in it. Some who believe don't have the resources so what will happen to all these thousands of community newspapers when these people are not there. I don't see that their kids are involved in their business, these businesses are only running because of the passion of these people who started in early 1900's.

The change can come only through the main publishing houses but they are too slow to move and most of them will be out of business in next 10 -15 years only companies who are investing online will survive. Papers who can link their offline and online in a proper way will be much more profitable than in past and will be barrier for pure online papers.

Technology is the key and they have to treat technology as a driver and not a hurdle.

Lets see what will happen with Newspapers.