READ ALL ABOUT IT

As the days passed last year, it was as if some creeping, flesh-eating virus had got hold of the newspaper industry. Nearly every month brought fresh evidence of decay, proof that a major contraction, driven by skyrocketing costs for newsprint, was occurring among papers large and small, famous and obscure. In January the Milwaukee Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel announced a merger, destroying about 500 jobs--and creating yet another one-newspaper town. In March the Fort Worth Star-Telegram abandoned its all-day edition. In April the Houston Post walked off the field, leaving its rival, the Chronicle, with the run of the city. Knight-Ridder then announced plans to cut 250 jobs at its two Philadelphia newspapers, the Daily News and the Inquirer. In the fall, managers at the Hartford Courant, which had never laid off a worker since its founding in 1764, asked 188 staff members to take voluntary buyouts, citing financial pressure from parent company Times Mirror.

By the end of 1995, obituaries had been written for New York Newsday, the Norfolk Ledger-Star in Virginia, the Baltimore Evening Sun and the 93-year-old Greenville Piedmont of South Carolina, while a grand total of 13,000 newspaper employees, 2.6% of the newspaper work force, lost their jobs or took buyouts. Downsizing, cost cutting, merging, closing: these catchwords not only dominated the papers' business pages but also became the stories of the newspapers themselves. IF YOU THINK THIS WAS A BAD YEAR, warned a headline in a newspaper trade magazine, BETTER GET USED TO IT.

The local newspaper, once an indispensable part of daily life, is becoming just one more piece of information clutter. Readership is declining even as new technologies transform or undermine the role newspapers have traditionally played: that of town crier, bulletin board, community troublemaker and trusted interpreter of the outside world. For years newspaper circulation has in general been on an inexorable slide. Between 1992 and 1995 it fell about 3% nationwide, with some major papers taking even bigger hits. The Los Angeles Times, for example, lost 3.5% of its circulation last year, though it is up slightly this year. The percentage of adults reading daily newspapers has fallen from 78% in 1970 to 64% in 1995. The figure is even lower for young people, ages 16 to 24: only 52% of them read a paper daily. And this year alone, Websites in hundreds of cities across the country are taking aim at newspapers' core business, running listings and classifieds with a mix of local news and entertainment.

Meanwhile, the actual number of daily papers has dropped from 1,570 in 1992 to 1,532 last year, and those that survive are being bought up by large chains. Since 1992 more than 300 dailies have changed hands, the overwhelming majority passing from one chain to another. The 15 largest groups now control more than half the country's daily newspaper circulation, and the trend is for all the papers in a region owned by one group to share photographs and reporters.