The Sun Isn’t Rising This holiday season, Christmas tree sales pop up in the same old familiar places, kids sit on Santa’s lap and cars cruise the 34th Street lights in Hampden. On the surface, the holiday season seems the same as always. But like a stealthy virus, the economic destruction wrought by the collapse of the mortgage market keeps spreading.

The latest casualty in the ongoing parade of disasters is the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by The Baltimore Sun’s parent, The Tribune Companies. Despite what their management would have you believe, this isn’t just a function of tough economic times. In the case of industries like newspapers and big auto, we are witnessing the final death throes of the 20th century industrial economic models.

The writing has been on the wall for a long time for the auto makers who dug their own economic grave with years of mismanagement and myopic thinking. The pan handling Big Three will get their $15 billion bridge loan from Congress that will keep them alive until the spring when another massive infusion of cash is going to be needed. Meanwhile, consumers, at least those that can afford cars, will continue to buy Toyotas and Hondas because they get more value for their dollar. The creation of a “car czar” by Congress is supposed to put them on the right track. But a government that still can’t get education right is unlikely to be able to fix the Big Three’s problems.

The sick economy is hastening what was an inevitable failure of fundamentally bad business models. Leverage might be to blame today, but big conglomerates like the Tribune are getting hammered because they haven’t been nimble enough to adjust to consumer tastes or come up with products that people want.

A case in point is The Sun. Every morning as I walk my dog, I toss my neighbor’s Sun paper on her porch. The lack of weight in the paper reflects not just the decline in the number of pages printed, but a lack of content that is worth reading.

Then I go back inside and turn on my computer to get the day’s news.

I am not alone; the decline in newspaper readership mirrors the increased use of the internet. People don’t have to, nor do they want to rely on just one source for their news. Why buy The Sun when you can read news and commentary from a range of online “papers” for free, choose which articles to read and get it all done in the same time it took you to read one newspaper?

The Sun spent a lot of money and time re-designing its paper ostensibly to make it more appealing to readers. Their money would have been better spent up-grading their website, which frankly stinks. It isn’t user friendly. Articles that are days old are listed with current news presumably to make up for the sparse content. With better news sites, from the traditional papers like The Times and new comers like The Huffington Post and digests like citybizlist, there isn’t any reason to read The Sun for national, international and business news. If it’s sports you crave, you can even read about the Ravens and Orioles in the Post, which sometimes has more insightful coverage anyhow. (One bright exception is business columnist Jay Hancock of The Sun who has been singularly outstanding.)

The decline in circulation for daily papers like The Sun may not be reversible. Today, people have too many choices and can mix and match news from a variety of sources to fit their interests.

Oblivious to the obvious, investors led by Ted Venetoulis have indicated an interest in purchasing The Sun. Local ownership may have appeal for some Baltimoreans, but today’s consumer isn’t sentimental when it comes to spending money, especially when the alternatives are mostly free.

Like the murder news it reports on its front pages far too frequently, The Sun will, before too long, be reporting its own death as a daily print newspaper.  4:19 PM •