"[Google and Yahoo] have boatloads of capital to invest in new ventures and acquisitions. They have strong existing news aggregation products, increasingly able to become the personalized "Daily Me," so long a staple of thinking about the-newspaper-of-the-future. Their principal revenue base is advertising, the lifeblood of newspapers' income.

Chew on this. As the year turns, the two hot technology companies have a market capitalization (shares of stock multiplied by share price) of roughly $100 billion, about $50 billion each. By contrast, the publicly traded newspaper companies, about 65 percent of the industry, are valued at about $80 billion."