Steve Chapman, columnist for the Chicago Tribune (a subsidiary of the newly bankrupt Tribune Company), says he's proud his employer didn't ask for a bailout:

I'm glad to see that no one in this industry has had the gall to ask Washington for a bailout. True, journalism provides a valuable service to the public. But if the public isn't willing to pay for that service, we have no grounds to demand a rescue. It's our job as journalists to provide something people want in a form that they want and are willing to pay for. If we can't, we deserve our fate. But I hold out hope that we can.

Chapman is to be applauded for staying true to his libertarian principles, even if it does end up costing him his job. But when we start talking bailouts, there is a bit of a distinction that sets newspapers apart.

The financial giants who came to the government with hat in hand were largely responsible for their own predicament.  They came up with complex new financial instruments that infected the entire system with reckless levels of risk and debt and found themselves holding the bag as the huge ponzi scheme began unraveling.

Likewise, the Big 3 spent three decades strapping themselves into crushing labor agreements and producing products that were inferior to their competitors.  They are destitute largely because of their own actions, because of bad management, and because of their resulting inability to compete.

I'm much more sympathetic to the plight of newspapers. Until a few years ago, most newspapers were cash cows - highly profitable enterprises that often formed the core of a larger business, like the Tribune Company.  Sure, some have been badly managed, but most of the difficulties have been the result of a technological revolution that has completely obliterated their business models.

This hasn't happened overnight, but it has happened fast enough and with such magnitude that these companies have failed to come up with a viable alternative, despite spending an awful lot of time and energy trying to solve what remains - at least thus far - an unsolvable problem.

In  other words, it's not all their fault. The Internet Revolution demanded that papers take their most valuable commodity - something which people had been loyally paying for for years - and put it online for free.  Not moving online was not an option. Nor was charging people to access information. Consumers were conditioned from the very beginning to expect free content online and, despite the WSJ.com continuing to stand out as the exception to the rule,  it remains a very tough habit to break.