Surreality

Eric Alterman captures it:

The men and women who continue to work in the newspaper business inhabit a surreal world. It's as if they are organisms inside a body felled by a fatal disease, and all the doctors prescribe is more poison. Charge for individual articles on the web? That would just send people to the free stuff. Demand that Google compensate the newspapers for the links? Watch your stories disappear when they stop coming up in Google searches. Stop publishing a print edition? Lose what's left of your only significant earnings base. Oh well--there's always more room for deeper budget cuts, more section cuts, more buyouts, fewer editors, etc.