@strypey It could be different in other countries, but in the US, newspapers were already in serious decline before the WWW burst onto the scene. In major cities across the country, the #2 paper either closed or merged backend operations with their main competitor.

I believe it was the early 1980s when the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner closed, leaving the Los Angeles Times as the dominant and sole regional paper for Southern California. Meanwhile, local papers in many areas went under common ownership and consolidated production with neighboring areas' papers to survive.

I think the death knell in SoCal was when one or two major radio stations went all news & traffic and one of the major television stations had local news from 16:30 to 19:00 Monday through Friday. Why do you need to buy & read the paper to see stories you heard about the night before over broadcast media?