Bad news about America’s newspapers, that are tumbling out too fast for their presses to keep up. The closure of “the Rocky” after 150 years and the 180-year-old Philadelphia Inquirer joined the owners of the Chicago Tribune and Minneapolis Star Tribune in bankruptcy proceedings.

San Francisco Chronicle  is threatening to close ; USA Today, has followed The New York Times in slashing its dividend to preserve cash. Titles from the venerable Cincinnati Post to the six-year-old New York Sun have folded.

Obituaries for the news business are being written in newsrooms around the world as advertising revenues that long subsidised the cost of newsgathering shrink, just as digital media usurp print’s role as intermediary between advertisers and customers. The crisis is affecting not just newsprint: most news magazines, broadcast news outlets and newswires are also suffering.

Meanwhile blogs, tweets, social networks and online news are growing exponentially…